Monday morning was spent packing up the car and attending to the million and one things that - no matter how much you try to front load these tasks - always arise whenever you are moving out of a house! Consequently, we also pared back our to-do list to the essentials i.e. a full clean of the house was out ("we can organise a cleaner from Berlin instead!") Of course, a trip to Galloping Green for a coffee remained on our essential list so off we went to bid 'see-you-later' to our favourite local coffee haunt and to, in turn, be ourselves bid 'see-you-later' by Lauren at Galloping Green! 🥰

Another key task bitten off this morning was sorting our snack situation. I had a twelve-box of Huel ready to fill the role of meal-on-the-go, an obscene quantity of Nature Valley bars and a just plain dumb amount of rice cakes and peanut butter (*not one rice cake was consumed on this trip 😅). Pamela had (quite sensibly) demurred at the suggestion that this sufficed for our snacks, so we set off for Spar at Cornelscourt to remedy this situation and stock up on some further ‘necessities’ i.e. a fruit and a lemon cake… 😅 More sensibly (if not any healthier) we also purchased some RedBull and some Starbucks’ coffee-shots incase we were not able to get much needed caffeine any of the mornings; the morning after the ferry seemed particularly dubious on this front.

Our snack game thoroughly sorted we set off for Rosslare! Soon after leaving, we realised that, with all of our rushing around, we had forgotten to eat enough for lunch. This was now my time to shine. 😏 I directed Pamela to crack open a Huel for us to share. Half-way through enjoying the bottle, it crossed my mind to ask her to double-check the expiry date ("you know, they have been sitting on top of our press for a long time... 🤔"). It was at this point we realised just how 'sorted' our snack situation was. With our Huel well and truly expired and little chance of food on the ferry (it being Covid times) we had to make other arrangements.

Around this time a recurring motif in our voyage was to make its first appearance - in the guise of a motorway McDonalds' outside of Gorey! 😅 This McDonalds' was actually pretty damn great; it offered vegan burgers and a nice set of picnic benches outside where we were able to sit with Kaisy and get some time out of the car. The picnic area also sported a large gathering of crows which - to my glee and Pamela's chagrin - I proceeded to share my chips with.

We arrived into Rosslare and, before heading to the port, filled up the tank to the brim (wanting to make as few stops for petrol on the continent as possible). We checked in for our ferry at 6pm with departure scheduled for 8pm. Check-in was a total breeze - even with a dog - and once we parked our car in the queue for the ferry, we were free to get out and stroll about (not that strolling around a port carpark is all that enjoyable - but still nice to be able to get some air and let Kaisy out to pee! Something we were very keen on before we got onto the ferry with her!😅)

The ship itself seemed pretty damn old and constructed in a manner that - if we are being kind - was more intent on 'function' over 'form' 😂 It basically looked like a fishing or container ship - accentuated by the fact that, unlike all other ferries I've travelled with - the cars were sitting exposed above deck! The 'pet deck' was pretty damn terrible! It was a small balcony above the car deck and had a single square foot of fake grass for dogs to pee on - the rest was just the exposed deck. Kaisy most definitely did not like being out on the pet deck! She basically kept herself flattened against the ground to cope with all of the rocking and wind. Making the pet deck unenjoyable for all parties was the fact that it was located overlooking the car deck and - as will understandably always happen - a number of people forgot to follow the instructions to not turn on their car alarms. This meant that, while standing out on deck, there was a constant chorus of cars alarming! So, the pet deck was a total bust from start to finish.

Inside the ship, things were not a whole lot better! The 'utilitarianism' of the ships design carried over into the cabins - which again felt more akin to a set of sailors bunks on a container ship - and was also showing some serious wear-and-tear. Bizarrely, the bathroom in the cabin was actually pretty nice and spacious 😅 and the very fact of having a bathroom in our cabin was also a serious blessing.

However, we had the worst luck with our room placement (coincidentally, it was room 13!!) It was in the bottom right corner of the ship, meaning we had maximum movement from the waves - the curtain was regularly lying 45 degrees out from the wall as we tilted around throughout the night. Also, outside our room was a service closet whose door didn’t close properly and, with all of the movement from the waves, it kept opening and slamming throughout the night. 😩

We were also the room closest to the pet deck which you might think was good luck, but was in fact terrible luck because it meant we had people with their dogs passing by our door and - though in hindsight this should have been predictable - Kaisy barked at everyone passing. 😧 At home, she only ever really barked if someone came to our front door and we completely failed to consider that in a cabin or hotel room, the door to your room is your front door. Kaisy basically barked throughout the entire night so, between that and the slamming service closet, little to no sleep was had. 😔

We had specifically booked this ferry due to it having pet-friendly cabins - which in theory sounded lovely - but in reality is a terrible idea that I will never go for again!! As we arrived, we had the chilling realisation that Kaisy might very well get sick, pee or poop in the room - due to motion sickness or anxiety - and if that should happen, we would (somehow) have to share the cabin with her!! We were very fortunate for that not to happen. Getting her to pee outside on the deck was almost impossible but luckily she finally did (I’ve never been happier to see a dog pee) and she did not have any accidents, luckily. 🙏 Also, in retrospect, it seems quite clear that they would use their oldest most worn ships as the ones with pet-friendly cabins!

After our night of "sleep", we arrived into Cherbourg at around 11am. This was to be my first time driving on the right-hand side of the road (which I was apprehensive about!) but my plan was very simple; follow the car in front of me off of the ferry and then drive behind them until we found a place to pull in where I could settle my nerves and take stock. But we had the “luck” of being the first car off of the boat! 😅 So that plan was scuppered and now not only did I have to quickly adapt to driving on the right, I needed to now lead a ferry full of cars out of the port!

Cherboug itself was blessedly small and the roads were quiet (being 11am on a Tuesday) so we successfully made our way out onto the motorway where the driving was much more straightforward.

Our first impression of both Cherbourg and the surrounding Norman countryside was just how Irish it all looked. The fact that it was drizzling which also helped to complete the scene! 😂 Even the colour of the road signs and road markings was not as drastic a change as when you cross the border up into Northern Ireland. The only thing to indicate that we were in France was the odd farmhouse that we passed that looked very French (in a WWI movie sort of way!)

We (again) pulled into a McDonalds off the motorway (at “Rue du 19 Mars 1962, 14230 Isigny-sur-Mer”) half-way between Cherbourg and Caen and as I walked up to the door it suddenly hit me; "oh my God we're going to have to speak French!" I had been focusing on the need to learn German for living in Berlin! It had not even crossed my mind that we would be in French speaking territories for the next couple of days. 😅 Also, considering we were not travelling through tourist spots, there was no guarantee that people would have good English; which indeed was the case!

I managed to intimate to the guy greeting me at the door that I wanted to order for take-away and he thankfully pointed me in the direction of a digital ordering system that I could set to English! 🙏 Pamela’s difficult experience of ordering vegetarian food in France years earlier proved to still be the case with basically nothing vegetarian (let alone vegan) on the menu except for a couple of mini goats-cheese wraps (which is also the most French option for a McDonalds' to have!) 😂 But, they were tasty and getting some hot food and - even more importantly - some hot coffee into our bellies - along with a sit down outside in the air - was amazing after the stress of the ferry and the early stages of adapting to the new driving.

One thing of note/concern here (which proved to be a harbinger for the whole trip) was that Kaisy was uncharacteristically defensive of our location; barking quite forcefully at people walking even relatively close to us. Considering that she had, until this point, never spent even a single night outside of the house in Beechwood, had never been in a car for more than an hour at a time, had herself been up all night ‘defending the cabin’ on the ferry and was no doubt picking up on anxiety from Pamela and I about the drive, this heightened state of alertness that Kaisy was in should have (again) in retrospect been quite predictable. But it definitely ended up becoming one of the more challenging aspects of the road trip.

Overall the driving was not too bad, but there were a couple of hairy moments on the way to Rouen - partly due to the lack of sleep on the ferry and also partly because it took a while for me to truly adapt my driving style. I was primarily focused on driving on the right-hand side and - while we had upfront said “we will go slow and not care if we miss our turn” - it took that first day of driving for that attitude to really sink into my bones. There was one junction that we needed to come off at where we were in the correct lane, but were stuck between two trucks which massively reduced our visibility. At the last minute I spotted our exit and ended up scooting across the chevrons they have on the ground right at the 'Y' in the junction. While it worked out fine (and was not very dangerous) it was closer than I would want for comfort and I would have preferred to have simply missed the exit and taken the next one! On a (no doubt) related note, I had a dream that night in Rouen about me causing a dump-truck to skid out and get rolled over by a steamroller 😅 The driver was fine in my dream (somehow) though ha!

We had to come off the motorway to get to the hotel in Rouen and driving through Rouen city was my first experience of driving through busier streets while driving on the right! Until we hit Berlin, this was the most nerve-wracking period of driving on the trip.

We stayed at the “Hotel Originals Relay La Bertelière” just outside Rouen. The hotel was just ‘fine’. Pretty standard, nothing-to-write-home-about fare. In summer it would no doubt be somewhat prettier but on a drizzly Tuesday in February it was doubly dreary!

There was nowhere to eat nearby but, in any case, we had beforehand decided to get room service as a “fun treat”... 😅 The menu (predictably for France) had nothing vegetarian on it but they said they could do a “veggie steak”. The food, when it arrived, was basically a Quorn oven fillet with a sparse few pieces of veg and roast potatoes - literally the same quality as you would make at home with an oven and microwave! But, the far more traumatic experience (for both us and the waiter who brought us our food) was Kaisy’s barking intensity when he knocked on our door and then, even worse, entered with our food. It is evidence of how drained and weary we were at this point that we did not foresee this occurring and have her out of the room while he arrived!

Once again we had some bad luck with our room placement; being the first room on a long hallway of rooms. As we settled down to sleep Kaisy barked a couple of times at people passing by the door. I sat up, turned on the light, and basically proceeded into a panic attack at the thought of another night of broken sleep with Kaisy torturously waking us up every 20 minutes with a bark. My main concern was the (very real fact) that another night of that would legitimately make it too dangerous for me to continue driving us. This is when Pamela produced her first key 'momentum shift' of the trip. She checked online and saw that our hotel had a spare room and that I could book it and stay there so that I, at least, would get a good night's sleep and be safe to drive us! She had earlier made this suggestion and I, in my stress and anxiety, had rubbished the suggestion (I was at this point in a sort of ‘freeze’ state), but now I realised the wisdom of this suggestion. So I set off down to the reception (at 11pm) to book an additional room (luckily this hotel had a 24 hour desk)!

The man at the desk was (understandably) quite confused to find a guest booking a second room at 11pm - my guess is he assumed that myself and Pamela had had a major falling out! I also (sheepishly) asked for a room far away from our current room but his English was not amazing and he offered me the choice of the room beside ours or across the hall from ours! 😅 If he had understood my request, he would no doubt have been confirmed in his belief that we had had a falling out of such magnitude that I could no longer bear to even sleep nearby to Pamela!! 😂 Assuming that Kaisy would be most audible in the adjoining room (which luckily from the other guests’ perspective it turns out was empty) I chose the room across the hall. Even at this, I heard the odd bark from Kaisy during the night (obviously not as much as poor but blessed Pamela who took the bullet of staying with her!) and I got a great night’s sleep! Which made all the difference while driving the next day.

We set off about 10am from Rouen, heading for a French town on the border with Belgium called Valenciennes. We picked it the night before as it looked to be about where we might want to take a break - and it was right between two massive nature reserve areas.

The drive to Valenciennes was (thankfully!) uneventful motorway driving. Upon arriving in Valenciennes, you got the distinct feel of it being a post-industrial sort of town - particularly around the outskirts. Again, similarities to Ireland were striking, with a bunch of streets lined with small red brick houses like you find in Ringsend! We parked our car at “51 Av. Villars, Valenciennes” (on some broken glass 😅) and headed out for a stroll with Kaisy for all of us to stretch our legs.

There didn’t look to be much in the vicinity for food, so I (ever the Subway proponent) led us off in the direction of the nearest Subway to at least get some reliable food. This brought us in towards the centre of Valenciennes and it was much nicer than the outskirts. Much more of a small French town vibe. Also, luckily, on our way to the Subway, we came across an amazing vegan cafe called “J’ai du Bowl” (at “​​54 Rue de Paris”) right across from a beautiful churchyard! We grabbed a couple of lentil curry bowls and a couple of coffees to go, sat in the churchyard for a stretch drinking our coffee and then took our food back to the car to eat. All in all, one of the nicest pitstops of the trip!

We set off from Valenciennes about 2pm and made for Namur. Crossing over the border into Belgium was basically invisible (good thing we spent time and effort working out what covid forms we needed to enter Belgium!! 😂) The two main things noticeable about the Belgian motorways was how much busier they were and also how poor the road surface was (at least down in the south around Liege).

Arriving into Namur was a relief and, once we arrived into our hotel - the stunning La Bergerie de Lives-sur-Meuse - and saw our equally stunning room, the relief intensified greatly! 😍 The entire hotel and setting was just beautiful. We were shown around by Juliette - the sister of the women who ran the hotel - who was so sweet and welcoming (and had perfect English which was also a relief for our tired brains). She had also just opened a restaurant on site - but it was only open at the weekends unfortunately. So next time!

We were shown to our room which was in its own little annex with only one other room in the building. The room was truly amazing and promised to be the first time we could relax in days. It had a comfy couch, its own private terrace with lovely views and a huge bath! The other room in the annex was supposed to have been our room but we were informed (a few weeks prior to arriving) that it was being renovated and would we mind swapping rooms. Both rooms were equally beautiful - so we had no problem swapping - and, even better, it now meant that there we were guaranteed that there would be no other guests in our annex! 🥳This meant that we would 🤞 have an entire night free of Kaisy's barking!!

As there was no restaurant on site weekdays, we drove into Namur to get some takeaway dinner. We found a cool looking burger place called “Chat & Chew Barger-Bar” (at Av. du Bourgmestre Jean Materne 209) which we decided looked promising. The drive there was in the dark and it was raining and it was a totally different experience to driving during the day. After that we decided to avoid driving at night until we were far more comfortable with the roads. Once we arrived at the restaurant, ordering in French was again an experience! But luckily it was helped along by some translation provided by a couple of guys sitting at a nearby table. 😅

We arrived back to our room and - because our tv came with a Netflix style system - we decided to watch a movie. However, the channels seemed to be available in every language but English! So we, instead, enjoyed our dinner and then - exhausted - decided to call it an early night; "safe" in the knowledge that Kaisy would not bark and keep us awake. However, what she did do was decide to not go to sleep and instead explore the room in the dark - which wouldn’t have been so bad on a carpeted floor but, on a wooden floor, her paws went ‘clack clack clack’ every step!! 😭 Then she started (very unusually for her) to cry about not being on the bed. Both Pamela and I were stunned at this unexpected turn for our night of peace! However, it hit me that we had a comfy couch and a pair of giant bath towels, so I laid out these towels on the couch, as a protective throw, and there she finally fell asleep. 🙏

Perhaps she was a little out-of-sorts because of a storm which seemed to be picking up outside - more on which to follow! 😅

We woke up much more refreshed on Thursday morning and were greeted with an amazing picnic basket filled with our breakfast at our hotel room door. This alone was one of the highlights of the trip!! 😍 We sat out on the terrace to eat, remembered that it was mid-February, and finished our breakfast off inside! The storm also appeared to have passed over, so after our delightful breakfast we set off for Germany in high spirits.

Once again, we picked somewhere half way along our route for a pitstop. Pamela identified a lovely set of lakes north of Cologne called Fühlinger See so we made for there. Along the way, we hit some really terrible weather; with lightning crashing in a field beside us and heavy wind and rain. But, not being from the area, we kind of just put it down to "wow, weather on the continent is intense!" Little did we know that it turned out to be a pretty major double storm - named 'Ylenia' and 'Zeynep' in Germany, 'Eunice' in the UK. We only realised this later that night in our hotel when our phone showed us weather warnings for hurricane strength winds on that day and the next!

Anyway, we made it to the Fühlinger See in one piece and, luckily, here it was clear weather. So we got out of our car for a stroll and to find some food! However, it soon turned out to be majorly off-season for this spot, and nothing was open (except a pretty dismal looking beerhall in a pavilion). So, rather than trying to navigate Cologne by car, we decided to continue on the road and made for (yet another!) McDonalds; this time outside of a small town called Wermelskirchen. This McDonalds - being in Germany - was a welcome shift from France and had multiple vegan options! So now - fed and watered - we set off for Bielefeld.

Something which struck us on this trip - and was evident here and in France - was the number of nuclear power plants and wind turbines that we passed! Actually, while on that point, something which really stood out was the crazy number of trucks on the road - at all points and on all days of the trip! I guess on the continent it makes sense that there would be a lot of goods shipped by road. But it really forced me to adapt my driving style; especially on the autobahn where the choice was often between moving in convoy at truck speed or overtaking them with cars bearing down on you at high speed. So - with our car loaded up to the brim, my unfamiliarity with the roads, the weather and our general lack of sleep - we chose to take it easy and move along at a steady 90km/hr with the trucks.

The previous evening in Namur, we had decided to pull off the same trick that we did in Rouen and book an additional room in the hotel in Bielefeld. However, it turned out to not be possible as the hotel was fully booked. So instead, we booked a room in a totally different hotel, in a neighbouring town, about 10 minutes down the road! However, once we arrived at the hotel in Bielefeld (the Parkhotel on Herforder Str.), it seemed like we had gotten very lucky with the room placement. It was a full suite (meaning the bedroom had a sitting room between it and the door out to the hall) and, on top of that, it was in a quiet corner of the hotel - all of which meant that Kaisy would likely not bark that much. The room was also beautiful!

However, we decided to not risk cancelling my hotel and having her bark after-all so, after checking Pamela into her hotel, we three got back into the car to drive to my hotel and check me in! I could have driven myself, but by this point Pamela and I had become a finely-tuned driver/co-driver pair, so we decided it would be good for me to learn the route between the hotels with a co-driver, before driving them alone. Plus, Pamela and I had a weird inverse issue with our phones where my phone had great network signal but wouldn’t reliably connect to the car, whereas Pamela’s phone had terrible signal but connected to the car perfectly! So we were mostly using Pamela’s phone plugged into the car, while connected to a network hotspot from my phone 😅 So, there was no guarantee I’d even have GPS while driving between the hotels alone - hence the need to learn the route initially with a co-driver.

My hotel (the RobrookS Hotel Garni on Bünder Str., Hiddenhausen) turned out to be a no-nonsense but cheerful hotel (once I managed to find the entrance; I had initially walked up to a private residence where a dog inside let me know I had gone astray!) One thing which is funny about bedding in Germany, they often put two single duvets on double beds, rather than a double duvet! In this hotel, I had booked a double room but specified that it was for one guest so, when I entered the room, I found just one single duvet and pillow on a big double bed! 😅

After checking me in, we three headed back to Pamela’s hotel to order room-service (it being the much fancier hotel!) But this time we learned our lesson and had Kaisy out of the room when it arrived!! The food was excellent and having a suite meant we had a sitting living room to eat it in which was also a joy.

After dinner I headed on back to my hotel (my phone happened to connect to the car successfully which was nice!). It was at this point - as mentioned above - that Pamela and I saw the hurricane wind warnings on our phones! After a brief chat on WhatsApp, we decided to sleep on what to do about the driving (i.e. whether it was safe to do so, or if we should book another night in Bielefeld - an option neither of us wanted to do, but good to know we had the option). Despite this uncertainty, both Pamela and I ended up having a good (bark-free) night’s sleep!

In the morning, the weather warnings were still in place but Pamela had looked at them in more detail and realised that the storm was moving eastwards (like us) and was going to arrive in each location on our route a couple of hours after us if we set off pretty much straight away. This meant being in Hanover before 12pm, Magdeburg before 2pm and Berlin before 4pm. So we set off with the plan of being in each of those locations 2 hours before the weather warnings took effect. Pamela’s hotel had forgotten to provide any non-decaf coffee in the room 😱 so we grabbed a RedBull and Starbucks’ coffee shot from our snack box and set out to race the storm to Berlin.

We decided to (obviously) take no meaningful pit-stops, and instead restricted ourselves to pulling into (where else) McDonalds' for a second cup of coffee outside Hannover (Kronskamp 1, 30890 Barsinghausen to be precise). This McDonalds' had stricter mask requirements - requiring an FPP2 mask, which we did not have - which meant we could not use the translated digital ordering system inside. Instead, we had to attempt an order at the drive-thru. With my steering wheel on the other side of the car, it meant that Pamela was now responsible for all such interactions (one of the true joys of taking a right-hand-drive car onto the continent!) Her first question was "do you speak English" and they said "no" so - having done zero preparation for this eventuality - we drove on through the drive-thru without ordering anything. We came out the other side, took out our phones, Googled how to apologise and ask for two coffees, went up and tried again! This time it seemed to work but when we got to the window they handed us just one coffee! 😅 We expressed surprise at the order and, luckily, a different woman came to the window who spoke perfect English and took payment for another coffee on the spot - saving us circling a third time! 😂

Back on the road and, an hour later, we again (this is getting ridiculous) called into a McDonalds' outside Magdeburg (at Berliner Allee 1, 39326 Hohe Börde) for lunch! We arrived (on schedule) around 12pm but, even within the 30 minutes we spent eating lunch we could see a noticeable shift in the weather. So we didn’t hang about, but instead set out for the home stretch to Berlin! 🥳

The final stretch was blessedly uneventful - we had the lovely sight of seeing our GPS say “turn left in 237km”! - with the only real thing to note on this stretch was a change in the type of forestry; along with some strange little sheds on stilts that piqued Pamela’s interest particularly! We still need to find out what those were...

The closing part of the road trip - the journey through Berlin to Prenzlauer Berg - knocked the intimidating driving in Rouen out of the damn park. It was intense to say the very least! The reason for this (later) became clear. While viewing the route in the morning, we could see that the GPS was taking us on a ring-road around Berlin - which made perfect sense as we were approaching from the south-west and Prenzlauer Berg is on the north-east of the city. However, we had neglected to pin this route along the ring-road and at some point on the journey, the GPS had updated its route (to account for traffic or some such reason) and was now taking us directly through the Berlin city-centre. We literally drove up by the Tiergarten and crossed over the river Spree onto Museum Island and out to Prenlzauer Berg via Alexanderplatz! 😱 This was - most definitely - closing out our road trip with a bang.

After much sweat and tears had been shed (luckily no blood!) we arrived into Prenzlauer Berg ahead of the main storm (though not ahead of the accompanying drizzle unfortunately! 😅). We parked up our car, met Imke (our landlady), got the keys and spent an exhausting hour moving all of our stuff up the 3 flights of stairs to the apartment!! Berlin has tons of free parking (which is amazing!) but it starts just a couple of streets over from our apartment. So, once we had finished moving in our stuff (and during a luckily timed break in the rain), we took the car and parked it up outside of a local garage where it was free. We strolled on back to our apartment and settled in for our first night; our road-trip successfully complete! 😄