The adventure begins....

May 6th 2013
Spent the night at Gravelines and left at 9am in glorious sunshine.....  just the ticket for the start of an adventure. As we are fulfilling my desire to follow the crusader trail we have adopted the personas of a knight and his squire and the Gf (courtesy of Blackadder) is now referred to as Bob ...(to whom I find myself strangely attracted when we wrestle like lads do..).
Bob decided to do driving on this trip in case of emergencies like P&M in Croatia last year and before we left drove down to Somerset for the service and most of the way back. All that remained was to get her (him) driving on the continent which has happened for nigh on 40 years.....so after the morning tea   stop, Bob took the wheel for a couple of hours thro Belgium and down to Luxembourg. In his (her) defence, the roads in Belgium are now the worst in Europe with potholes the size of dustbin lids which have to be dodged constantly whilst trying to avoid being rear ended by Lithuanian maniacs delivering Russian prostitutes by the lorry load to paedophiles in Belgium and then having 30 miles of roadworks with lanes so narrow that traffic was moving in sequence to avoid side swiping.......and the lane markings were non existent in places where we had to switch motorways so it was a bit fraught.....but Bob coped well and I only screamed once.
So well in fact that we made Luxembourg ahead of schedule and merely stopping to refuel at £1 a litre, pushed on to Metz by 3.30. We intended overnighting at an aire by the river Moselle but it was overflowing(campsite, not river) so we stopped at the camping municipal next door which was very pleasant. 5 main walk into town which is well worth a visit and the cathedral is most impressive with stained glass from the 13th.C to Chagall in the 20th.
Very buzzy city. Good place to visit.