Day 1 Home to Boulogne (sur Mer)

The temperature is about 32 degrees and for those reading in America that is the hot 32 in Centigrade. There is now enough traffic for jams but the Pagoda stays cool running along at 3,500 rpm. The humans are broiled despite having the top down. It reminds me of Kuwait City at night when the hot sandy breezes would raisin your eyeballs, though Kent doesn’t smell of open sewers.

We pass many, many cars broken down.  About one every 2 miles, and not an AA van in sight.  Looks like other people have neglected their post-lockdown car re-fettling.

Top tip for the Tunnel is to buy the Flexi ticket.  Very expensive, but at short notice on a Friday afternoon on the first August weekend after lockdown, all tickets are expensive. They were having ‘timetable disruptions’ but the Flexi puts you past all queues and onto the train. We were out the other end, wet with sweat as from a ride on the Central Line, but out on (the other side of) the road in under an hour from check-in. The conveyance of the day contest is a tie between a ’70s orange BMW i8 and a viper green Lamborghini, running together. quite cool.

With the open top on the M25 we could hear every slapping untaut Tautliner and every whistling ladder. Now we are on the holiday roads along the Cote Opale where the French are doing sound work with picnic baskets, buckets, spades and roadside parking. Hermann is well suited to these country roads, especially if you knock his auto box down to third for the hills.  Everywhere we go people point, smile and wave, they are genuinely pleased to see Hermann.  We had admiring looks in the UK, but this is on a different scale.  Small children in arms are turned around to see us and have their hands waved at us.

Sid read a review of the new BMW Morgan which explained that at 40mph it was a a very nice car. We saw three Morgans today, with eleven wheels between them. This is a classic car paradise.  And – off the autoroutes – not a Brit in sight, but very many Belgians and Dutch.

Boulogne has been a serious port since Roman times. Then there was a German presence (not the more recent one) and there are German names along the coast, like Tardinghem. Then the area was often English owned. Other history easily seen from the car: the Memorial to Napoleon’s Grande Armee (as Enoch Powell said, all political careers end in failure) and the astonishing concrete of the Germans’ Atlantic Wall.

Our hotel is just outside the town walls. In the evening Sid and Doris walked down to the river. There is nothing old there. It was all bombed flat to deny it to the German navy soon after D Day. Walking back to the intact old town walls we find a brasserie with four bieres pressions. Better, the owner directs us to, books us into, the Grillades in the pretty eating street. It is time for harengs, goat cheese, steak frites and the justly famous cafe gourmand with its three desserts.