18th May 2013

When we were coming towards the end of our trip last year (around September 2012), we decided we would store the car and caravan in England and come back over to see the Eastern European countries. We wanted to do this before Cara goes to school in 2014, because from then on we will be limited to school holidays.

While we were back in Australia, Loche worked fly-in fly-out doing very long hours. He finished his contract at the end of April and we flew out of Brisbane on the 18th of May. We flew with China Southern airlines and they provided complimentary accommodation in Guangzhou. The airline was generally good, the only complaint we had was the 2 hour wait in Guangzhou airport while we waited for them to organise our accommodation. Then we were all crammed into a mini bus for a 40-minute drive to the hotel. By this time it was about 8pm and we hadn't eaten since a couple of hours before landing. We got to the hotel and asked for a family room but when we got to our room we found two single beds. Way too tired to care, we made do with what we had and fell asleep exhausted.

When we arrived at Heathrow we picked up a hire car and as we were driving out of the Hertz facility, we had to stop at the security guards gate. The car stalled when we stopped and we couldn't get it started again. Luckily the guard talked us through it - apparently to cut down on emissions, these new fandangled cars turn off whenever you stop at lights or an intersection etc and to get it started again, you have to put your foot back on the clutch. Luckily we sorted it out at the Hertz office and not in the middle of London traffic!

We drove to the hotel about 5 kms from the airport and were asleep by 6pm and wide-awake at 3am, so we decided to leave for Howden and miss the London peak hour traffic. We arrived in Howden at about 9am (we stopped a few times along the way) and went straight to the caravan park where our van and car were stored. We knew the car was going to have a flat battery so we had to get it jump started and down to the mechanics to get an MOT (roadworthy) and a few other things done to it. We wanted to get the Discovery sorted out while we still had the hire car to use.

We ended up spending a week in Howden, staying with Barry Jo, Al and Will (thanks guys once again for your wonderful hospitality). We moved into our caravan on the Sunday for a few days to make sure everything was working before we ventured too far. We were pleasantly surprised to find the caravan in very good condition with not a lot needing to be done to it.

Our original plan was to go to Cornwall and Ireland first and then travel over to Europe, but the weather in England was not all that flash and wouldn't be much better in Ireland, so we decided to head straight to Europe and we can do Ireland at the end of the trip.

On Wednesday the 29th of May we left Howden and drove down to Ashford, a little town about half an hour from Dover. We parked the caravan there for the night and then drove back to Seven Oaks to catch up with Ellen for dinner. I used to work with Ellen at John Deere and she lives in London now. We had a lovely night, apart from the food and are going to try and meet again further down the track.

We were booked on a ferry the next morning out of Dover. The Dover / Calais ferry route is probably one of the busiest (and shortest at only and hour and a half) but we hadn't actually gone from here before. It was Loche and Cara's first time seeing the beautiful white cliffs of Dover.