There and Back

The unloading and turnaround had run like clockwork. The bed and mattress shop had delivered and assembled my new bed; the BT engineer had checked that the phone line was working and had installed broadband complete with BT Vision television service. The previous tenants had offered two big armchairs that they were about to donate to charity and I had earmarked a fridge-freezer, bedside cabinets, a chest of drawers, an office desk and chair and various other bits and pieces in local charity shops. The boiler worked, there was hot water, bulbs in the light-sockets and in the first 24 hours all the cartons and cases had been sorted and many had been unpacked. 

Eurotunnel - such a civilised way to cross.

The next stage was to head back fast across Europe, back to Caldarola to return the car. I am sure that for a holiday jaunt, this is probably a beautiful route, but when you have a tight schedule and are driving from dawn to dusk, all you 

Busy autoroutes across France

see is lorries, and I was thankful that I had thought of packing a selection of John leCarré audio CDs. 

I motored from Lincoln to St.Omer on the first day, annoyed to arrive after the proprietor had locked up and gone home, and I had to hang around until another guest arrived back after their dinner so that they could let me in. I picked up a key which had my name on a scrap of paper beside it on the unmanned reception desk and grumbled my way upstairs to bed.

Next day John leCarré kept me awake, alert and entertained as I hammered through the kilometres across France and down to the Swiss border. I had booked myself into a cheap motel: a very cheap motel in the Formule 1 chain. This chain is for small continental people, not for large Northern Europeans.  

If there are two of you,  don't think that the answer is to book a room with two beds, because Formule 1's policy is that there is always (like on the old London buses) room for one more on top. 
The second bed in a Formule 1 hotel room is a bunk bed accessed by a ladder alongside 

Room for one more on top

the double bed at ground level. 
To be fair, there are worse cut-price chains across France, and the development of such has given French sports clubs, hikers, skiers, students and the population in general the freedom to travel all over France at affordable prices. Hence the motto of all trans-continental drivers is "Well, it's only for one night." 

By contrast, I knew that a couple of days later I would be staying at the Heathrow Travelodge, which had cost me even less than Formule 1 (£25 with advance booking) and I knew I would have a full-sized bed, and an en-suite bathroom with endless hot water. 
In Formule 1 the nasty little shower room and the toilet were situated along the corridor. 
The low cost of my motel room gave me an excuse to find a pleasant little Alsatian hostelry for dinner, where I could eat and drink to the value of what I had saved, without feeling over-extravagant. 
I slept diagonally across the bed, setting the alarm on my phone for 05.45 in the knowledge that I would be back in Caldarola in time for dinner. It would by Autoroute, Autostrada and Superstrada for all but the last couple of kilometres, and it didn't matter when I arrived, so there was no pressure for this last leg of the journey - just the prospect of working out how much I could carry on the flight back from Ancona to Heathrow in a couple of days' time.