Friday, July 24 : With Calais being barely 100km's away, we took off kinda late and arrived at the Hoverport around noon. Our cousin Martin had arived early too, so we just checked if we could get on an earlier flight (no kidding, Hover calls'em that way) than 3pm.
There wasn't any space left on the 2pm Hovercraft, but they'd put us on the 2pm Seacat catamaran and we agreed, happy that we'd get over to the UK one hour earlier. Well, the Seacat doesn't go as fast as the Hovercraft, and guess what, the 3pm Hover passed us while our Seacat had to wait in Dover harbor for an empty dock :-/
Once we had disembarked, we went directly onto the M2 Motorway and headed towards London, in hopes to have passed it before the friday afternoon rushhour kicks in. Soon we hit M25 and at Dartford Crossing the queues for the tunnel underneath the River Thames weren't to bad (the other direction, coming from the north, there's a bridge over the river). We continued on the M25 up to Epping, where we went onto the M11. In Harlow we went off again and found us a great campground in Roydon. The campsite was on a very well tended green, the sanitary facilities are among the best I've ever seen on a campground, and they have a very fine pub in a 1 minute walking distance from where we'd camped!! We went there for some food, hoisted quite a few pints and very late that night we tumbled back to our tents :-) Saturday, July 25 : everybody was slightly hungover this morning ;-)  but a great breakfast helped us back into the saddle and onto the M11, heading north again. We passed Cambridge, went onto the A10 towards Ely where we had a little break. In Peterborough we took the A15 up to Sleaford, over to Newark upon Trent and onto the M1. We passed Leeds, went off the next exit and put up tents on a campground in Follifoot.