Bush Hospital Foundation - Jersey to Monte Carlo - Day 9 & 10

Hi again everybody!

Well you will be relived to know this is the last chapter in our story - despite it only being Saturday.... and I'm going to send this email to all the same people despite it being very likely I'll see a few of them before they read it!

Our last e-mail found us staying at the Swiss hotel with the rather 'special' toilet.... having arrived at 3am.

This was the view the following morning..

We say Switzerland, but the area we were staying in was called 'Campione d'Italia' and has its own yellow border line around it on the map, which may suggest its a principality like Monaco, San Marino etc - if anyone knows, please let us know!

So, we left Campione at 10.30am, bright eyed and bushy tailed, with the full intention of find a hotel at a reasonable hour that evening.......

We decided to take a route back across the Italian Border..

.... so headed down the map though Mendrisio, Verese, and then across towards Aosta and final destination of Italy being Courmayeur.

Our real purpose for this slightly unusual route was to drive through the newly repaired Mont Blanc tunnel - all 11611m of it!

From Courmayeur, through the tunnel, and back into France...

... we then crossed the border once again, into Switzerland

...and headed for Montreux

..where we found a little bit of Italy...

.... paid our respects to the Statue of Freddie Mercury

.... and looked across Lake Geneva

- a beautiful sight, and any Queen fans may recognize the next photo's as being remarkably similar to the front cover of the Album Made in Heaven.

There is also a Statue of Charlie Chaplin in Montreux, and a statue of a chap called Mihai Eminescu - pic enclosed so you can translate it for yourselves and tell us what it means!

Leaving Montreux now and we followed along the South border of Switzerland, taking in the stunning scenery and lovely tarmac (still wet) and start looking for a place for dinner, which we duly find at 9pm (me thinks its starting to look highly unlikely we'll have an early night......) where we had a fine meal of beef steak, although I'm sure the menu said Lamb.... but still.... and we handed over our only Swiss money, which conveniently came to the amount the meal cost - a bit of luck there perhaps!

Which is more than could be said for finding any fuel stations - as it has now gone midnight and we're hoping that crossing the French border will find us some open garages.

Unlikely I suspect. Correctly. At 252.2 miles since our last fill-up, the car refused to go any further!

Which makes it all the more fortunate we had the foresight to bring a 10litre jerry can with us. And even more fortunate that we'd filled it up at our first fuel stop 10 days ago!

You may think that gets us home and dry, except 10 litres of fuel in my car might get us 40 miles on a very good day -  and it was still night and we hadn't managed to find any petrol or hotels yet!!

Still, we headed in the general direction of a French motorway, and the computer told us there was a station approximately 50km away - touch and go, but we made it and got ourselves a refreshing tank of Super Plus, and refilled the jerry can to be on the safe side!!

We continued heading towards what would be the general direction of our ultimate destination of St Malo, and finally found an Ibis Hotel at 5am, about 100km North-West of Dijon. Ever so slightly further than we'd intended to drive that day - a total of 519miles. At this point we seemed to be running out of countries as well as money, so I already had my darling sis (a.k.a. Davina McCall) on the case to find out about rescheduling boats for Saturday night or even Saturday morning.....

Approximately 5hours after getting our heads down, the very same darling sister rang to say their was a 4.30pm Friday night sailing, as well as the Saturday boats. Obviously the challenge of driving 342miles to get a boat that we weren't even booked on and required us checking in by 3.30pm was too much to be missed - so we promptly upped, dressed and re-fuelled (we're getting wise to this petrol thing now you know!) and departed...... Autoroute estimated that this trip would take 5hours and 20 minutes, which baring in mind we hit the road at 10.40am  and would need another re-fuelling stop was not a good thing! However, despite warped disks and tyres which were none to keen to make tracks through water logged motorways

(ok, this isnt actually a water logged motorway, but it was a once dry field off to one side)

, we finally turned up at St.Malo harbour bang on 3.30pm - which included a 20 min traffic jam into St Malo - just typical!

So there you have it - the 2002 epic 'Garry and Mike go to Monte Carlo and visit 5 countries' trip draws to an end - a thoroughly good time had by all, and now I need a new car!

For anyone bored enough to have read this far, you really do deserve to know the cruel hard facts about the driving!
Our total mileage covered, from leaving Jersey to returning, was 3317.
We burnt our way through a staggering 668 litres of petrol (its ok chaps, it was unleaded) at a cost of 751 euros (or £483 in old money)

The real anorak stuff now follows - you think I should be employed by AutoCar???
Our average fuel consumption was 21.54 mpg, our best was 24.87mpg and our worst was 15.50 mpg (hmm, I wonder which particular tank that was!)

And how do we know all this? Because we have a laptop and noted everything down in case its needed as evidence!

That's all folks..... till next year.

Thanks for all your support, and thanks to all our sponsors, and people who've helped us along the way.

And special thanks to Mike for not only plotting and navigating our route expertly and learning the intricacies of Autoroute 2002...

... but for being patient enough to tell me where to turn (we'll get this left and right thing sussed for next year!), and putting up with me and my special driving style. And for his uncanny ability to hold onto a laptop and a camera whilst I'm going round hairpin bends up mountains like Colin McCrae (well, trying). 

Garry & Mike