155 AUTOTRAINS, AUTOMOBILES, AUTOFERRIES?

Looking through the Pre-Rally Bible, I stumbled across something called Auto-Train, a service in which your vehicle hitches a ride on a rail-based car transporter while you travel in style to your destination. The service ran from Nice to Calais, which would have been an absolute boon for our trip.

Notice I used 'ran' instead of 'runs'. The service to Calais ceased in 2017, with the link to Paris ceasing in 2019. Loading the car up in Nice and then letting the train take the strain, the length of France, would have been great, leaving just a few hundred miles of British motorway between us and home.

As it stands, we will need to drive all the way down to Nice and back, although I did have an idea of taking a car ferry to Blighty to save a few hundred miles of boring French motorway.

It would mean driving across the bottom of France, skimming the Pyrenees and into northern Spain, but would save around 120 miles.

Another benefit is that we would get to visit some more interesting places - potentially Toulouse and Bilbao (a city on my 'to see' list), and add Spain to the European tour. We would also get a full day to relax before the final push from Plymouth or Portsmouth to Liverpool, a trip Lisa and I have made before, and Richie makes regularly.

The main downside is that it adds another couple of hundred quid onto the bill. It also adds a day at sea across the Bay of Biscay, which sits on a steep continental shelf and is exposed to the Atlantic, making it susceptible to strong winds can create large waves. Get a bad weather day, and it could be wall-to-wall puke, get a good day, and it is a delicious evening meal followed by a trip to the discoteque!!!

What ever we decide I think, realistically, we will need to break up the journey home into four-hour chunks, like Nice > Lyon > Reims > Calais or Nice > Montpellier > Toulouse > Bilbao, unless we decide to power through and do two 6-hour slogs from the Med to the English Channel. Decisions, decisions...