Montigny-le-Roi 13th June 2013.

What a day a day makes!

The drive into France involved again a foursome: breakfast in the Netherlands, coffee and croissant in Belgium, lunch in Luxembourg an finally an evening meal in France. So we get added variety and spice!

From our overnight halt at Maastricht, we rapidly arrived in the hell of Liege. By that I mean we are into an area of industry, heaving traffic and, as the French put it, 'bouchons'. Today we could have done with a 'tir bouchon', as we had to enjoy two log holdups. Where we have the term 'by-pass' or M25, here they call it, aptly I think, the Ring as in Berliner Ring, or Liege Ring. Here on the decidedly leisurely Liege Ring we sat for forty minutes in the teeming traffic simply because there were road works off the Ring: traffic queued for maybe six kilometres to exit and we could not move much as the exiting vehicles occupied the main lanes. A curse but no one seemed to worry too much, thankfully!

Later we hit another hold up but this time two! No doubt someone will wish to say, just like the UK but I must disagree. In this case the problem was caused by 4 different streams of traffic from 3 different places trying occupy one lane: obviously static queues formed! When we escaped from that holdup, the next one appeared, almost joined to the earlier one but this time just two lanes onto one: why? Two men moving crash barriers over a road space of, maybe 50 meters and the queue each side of the auto route of maybe 2 kilometres! Oh joy!

After that, the slowly arriving black rain loaded clouds driven on by strong gusty winds offered us the thrill of downpours, which we duly got. But at least we were driving and not sat on a campsite hoping for sunshine!!