Hitting The Road Again

Summer’s here and it’s time for us to head out onto the road again for our first holiday since the birth of Lucas. Yes, this time we will be travelling as a family of four.

This trip has been planned very quickly and, in fact, the planning is still quite thin at this stage. We’ll have to do the rest once we actually get underway.

We’ll leave Amsterdam this coming Sunday morning, driving south through the Netherlands to Belgium, where we’ll continue down along the coast of Flanders until we reach the port of Calais in France.

We’ll spend the night in France and then take the Channel Tunnel Monday morning to Folkestone on the English side. From there, we’ll drive on the wrong side of the road along the M20 and M25 to Henley-on-Thames to visit friends of ours who recently returned to England to live.

Tuesday morning, we get back in the car and head towards the county of Cornwall to visit Fenella and family. That will be at least a five hour drive, so whether we’ll actually make it to our final destination that day is rather unpredictable at the moment. It all depends on how well Lucas travels. I hope this trip serves to break him in and make him as good a traveller as his sister.

After an as yet undetermined number of days in Cornwall, we’ll drive to Cardiff and spend a night or two in the Welsh capital.

Then, it’s on further to Fishguard for the ferry across to Rosslare in Ireland.

Once on the emerald isle, we’ll drive north towards Dublin, where Opa Tony, Oma Bernie and my three newly discovered half-brothers will be waiting for us.

We haven’t got any further than that yet, but even that slice of the route is already good for around 1800 kilometres.

After the family visit, we’ll do a coastal loop of Ireland, including Northern Ireland, playing the intermediate stops pretty much by ear. We’re therefore not yet sure where exactly the trip will bring us.

We’ll be gone until the second week of August, so it’s going to be quite a lengthy road-trip of some five weeks or more. Our return is dictated only by Eloïse’s need to be back for the new term at her peuterspeelzaal.

We’re very excited about this new trip, but there hasn’t been a lot of time to think about it in the run-up to our departure, due to all kinds of tedious tasks that have to be taken care of before we leave. In just a few short days, though, we’ll be back on the road, visiting friends and exploring new places. I can’t wait.