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Welcome to our trip to Switzerland and Provence. We will be visiting a number of old favourites as well as some new destinations.

Unfortunately the car park at Citi Europe outside Calais continues to ban overnight stops by motorhomes. I understand this is because the local police were having a lot of problems with illegal migrants hiding in, on top of, and under motorhomes heading for the UK. It’s such a shame those motorhomers didn’t take more care and check their vehicles more thoroughly before heading through the border controls. I always used to check around and under the vehicle and then when approaching the Departures kiosk would pick up a bit of speed and then jab my brakes hard, so that anybody hiding on the roof would tumble on to the bonnet.

This ban is very inconvenient, requiring us to find somewhere else to spend the night before doing some shopping and setting off on our journey. On the last trip we used the Auchan supermarket car park at Boulogne-sur-Mer, which worked well, and so we’ll be doing more of that in the future. Truckstops are very convenient as we can spend the night just off the motorway parked among the HGV’s, but they can be noisy places, and I think by introducing the just-off-the-motorway-supermarket idea we’ll have the best of both worlds.

Our first visit is to Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland, somewhere we love to visit, and this visit is likely to be our last. We’re not due to arrive there until after 15:00hrs on Saturday so we’ll be taking a steady ride, with the option of spending one night at another Swiss campsite en-route if need be.

As usual we have not booked a return ticket, preferring to play it by ear; though I guesstimate we’ll be away about six weeks.

Again, we’ll be refuelling at supermarkets where we would expect to find the cheapest fuel available in each area. We prefer to buy Shell or BP diesel normally, but given the current cost of fuel (though thankfully it seems to be coming down a bit) we need to keep the cost down as best we can.

It will be good to escape Broken Britain for a while. Thanks to our political masters we continue to suffer the long term effects of the pandemic and particularly the lockdowns, which probably wouldn’t have been necessary had the government made it law that a face mask must been worn when out in public, and not just a 'face covering', but a proper FFP2-standard face mask, ideally with a free one-off issue of a pack of ten to all citizens, but of course, they didn’t have the masks to issue given their lack of preparation for a pandemic.

The invasion of our shores by illegal migrants continues unabated. These days they even have the luxury of being ‘rescued’ by the Royal Navy, coastguard and RNLI for most of their journey, followed by a nice locally made pizza on arrival, a free hotel room, pocket money and a free mobile phone to stay in touch with the folks back home. I doubt any of them will be having sleepless nights this coming winter as to how they’re going to pay their heating and food bills.

My heart goes out right now to young families earning the minimum wage, who are trying to cope with all the price increases for fuel and food, and then there are those earning more but who also have mortgages, the cost of which is set to spiral.

As for the politicians, I can’t really complain as I didn’t vote for any of them. After the disgraceful scenes in Parliament of cross-party Remain MP’s deliberately doing their best to undermine the democratic will of the people regarding the Brexit referendum, aided and abetted by that treacherous dwarf, Speaker John Bercow, I vowed never to vote again, and I haven’t, not even in local elections.

So join us as we escape south together, and let's just hope the drought and wild fires throughout Europe are at an end.