Up and out by quarter to five, the house still dark, the road emptier than I have seen it in months. There is a particular quiet to that hour, neither night nor properly morning, when the only other vehicles are lorries, early commuters and the odd dog-walker’s car. We took the Mercedes SL280, a 1997 model, with the soft top up and kept up the whole way. The hard top is at home; the soft top means that when the summer weather does arrive we can have it down and enjoy the driving properly, which is some consolation for the noise it lets in. The weather today could not make up its mind, so the decision to keep it closed made itself.
Breakfast at the Folkestone LeShuttle terminal, at Leon’s, before the crossing. I had an egg and bacon bap and a coffee; Ochi had a coffee with soya milk and not much else. We sat among the usual early travellers and watched the boards for our shuttle. There were others plainly bound for the same sort of long weekend as us: a knot of sports cars gathered together, the drivers comparing routes in the way men do over coffee at six in the morning, off on some group run south; and a band of Harley riders in their leathers. Now and again one of them would fire up an engine out on the apron, and the sound carried right into the terminal, the deep throaty roar of a V8 answered by the slower, looser beat of the V-twins. A good noise to set off on.
The crossing itself was the one small surprise of the day. We had braced ourselves for the new EES biometric registration at the border, fingerprints and photographs and the queues everyone has been warning about, and instead the checks were simply closed. We went straight through to French passport control and out the other side without breaking stride. I assume this was a temporary suspension to keep the traffic moving rather than a system not yet switched on, for I gather it has been fully live since the tenth of April.
After that the day became the drive, and the drive was a good one. France, then Belgium, then into Germany, the roads relatively empty and the progress constant. Three stops on the European side, more or less evenly spaced: a short leg-stretch at the first, food and fuel in the middle, another short stretch near the end. The car drove very well for its age. A little noisy, as the soft top, insulated though it is, does not seal out the world the way the hard top does, so there was always a layer of wind and road under everything. The steering is vague and uncommunicative, but that is how these were built, and after the first hour the hands stop expecting anything else. Around thirty miles to the gallon throughout, which I was pleased with.
I treated it at the middle stop. The pumps offered 100 RON unleaded, ethanol-free, a step up from the 95 we run at home, and I bought it on the car’s behalf rather than my own, at something close to two euros fifty a litre. Shell, I think, though I did not check closely. An indulgence, plainly, but the engine is older than a good many of the drivers on that autobahn and has earned the better stuff.
We played music most of the way, a long eclectic mixture of rock and jazz and classical with a little funk thrown in, the sort of programme that only assembles itself properly on a long drive. We finished, somewhere in the last stretch, with Pink Floyd’s ‘Delicate Sound of Thunder’, the live album, for by then we had turned off the autobahn for the final hour and were running through forest and open country instead. It was unexpectedly lovely: the road folding in under dark stands of trees, then opening out across fields of a green so deep and wet-looking it seemed almost lit from within, the hills rising soft and wooded ahead. After a day of motorway it was like changing register entirely. The talk, between songs, kept circling back to tomorrow and the show, what we wanted to see, which exhibitors to take first, what we might actually buy as opposed to merely covet.
We reached Kunzmann’s at half past five, local time, near enough twelve hours after leaving home once the hour’s difference is accounted for. Reception was courteous and unfussy and we were shown up to the room without delay. It is clean and more than large enough, of a quality I had hoped for, and the view is the thing:
south over the parkland, tall spruce, a broad lawn with a giant chess set laid out on it, swing seats and chairs scattered about, a timber cabin, gravel paths threading between, and beyond the meadow the wooded hills. No photograph ever quite holds that depth of green, though I attach one here and let it try.
Dinner at quarter to seven, half board. It was good, properly cooked and properly served, without a single dish that demanded to be remembered. That is no complaint. It was the reason we changed our minds about where to stay this year: last summer we had an à la carte dinner here that was very good indeed for both the quality and the price, enough to draw us away from the guest houses we used the previous two years. This is our third year running at the show and our first night under this roof, and the decision feels sound so far.
To bed early, or what passes for early after a day that began before five. Tomorrow the Abenteuer & Allrad at Bad Kissingen, four days of it though we only need the one, more than four hundred exhibitors across off-road, caravanning and overlanding, expedition vehicles and motorhomes and all the equipment that goes with them. That is properly a matter for tomorrow’s entry.
