Arrived in Dover the night before the 8am ferry booking and spent the coldest night of our lives ‘wild camped’ near the terminal on Marine Parade! We woke to a freezing gale force wind blowing and made our way to the ferry terminal and boarded pretty much on time after queuing amidst a forest of giant trucks, we were beginning to think we were the only non-commercial vehicle planning on boarding this boat. The crossing was rough but not too uncomfortable and we arrived on time in Dunkirk, switched on our Sat Nav (fondly nick named Stella) and followed her instructions. She steered us successfully to our first resting place next to the river ‘Our’ and within sight of a beautiful castle. We walked into town and tried the local brewed beer with dinner, ‘Bofferding’, a charming name for a very nice beer. Back at camp we were literally 3 meters from the river and woke the following morning to the song of various birds going about their business on the water.

The afternoon saw us arriving in the village of Sulzburg, surrounded by pine clad hills, part of the Black Forest, just south of Freiburg in Germany. Stella had taken us right to the doorstep where we were welcomed by a tiny brown squirrel just behind our resting place for the night. We wonder how we managed before Stella, she has impressed us and changed our lives, steering us through countless complex junctions and interchanges where we would otherwise have surely come unstuck. Tomorrow we head for Italy.