The road trip

Good morning/evening
 
You may remember my post about the new landlord regulations coming into force in the UK, so now we are in the UK and came by road as we needed to take a variety of tools, to do the work we need to do. (Do we really need 3 types of drills and 2 woodworking routers?) The road trip I was looking forward to, being in the UK I am/was not, the strange thing is although this was our family home, it has been 17 years since we have lived there and it does not feel like going home, but it is what it is and work needs to be done. We do have an agent that manages things and does organise repairs as and when needed but some of the work we may as well do ourselves as they do add on a hefty fee.
 
The route
So we organised the house to be empty, planned a route and booked a ferry, giving ourselves 4 or 5 days to get to the ferry in France. The route is to go from Bulgaria to Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France and then England.
 

 
So this should take us 30 hours and 34 minutes to do the 2683 Kilometres, but have allowed ourselves extra time for any delays, bad weather etc. It even calculated an approx. Fuel cost of just under 300 Euro but I have a heavy right foot so I will ignore that! We will share the driving so it may even itself out. 
 
Once we get to the UK we will probably have a night at a hotel before we get the keys to our house and then have appointments planned for the EPC inspector who will test and rate our house for its energy efficiency and once we know what rating we have, it will give us an idea of the upgrades we need to do. The solar survey is booked in also but hope we do not have to go down that route. There will be the basics, update the kitchen and bathroom, redecorate, remove an old chipmunk enclosure (yep lol) renew some garden fence and so on. We have planned a month to do the work and then we will drive back 'home'.
 
On the way
 
I drove for the first stint through Bulgaria to Ruse, and although I was going as fast as I could it was a slow section, mainly down to pot holes and no motorway and a few mountains to contend with. We crossed the bridge into Romania and there were many kilometers of scenic countryside, where there were towns and villages some of the buildings had spectacularly ornate roofs. We stopped in a fantastic hotel and had some really great food, just what you need after a long day of driving.
 
So with an early start we managed to finish driving through Romania and then we were into Hungary and the roads were pretty good so we managed to cross the border into Austria which again was very scenic, but as we were heading towards Wein on the motorway we saw strange red lights in the sky and had no idea what they were. (perhaps we don't get out enough) The hotel was just a roadside motel but it had a good bed and shower and an amazing selection at breakfast of meats, cheeses and bread, some wonderful pastries and juices. A good start to the day.
 
What do you think these flashing red lights are? They covered a huge area. Answer at the end.
 
 
Germany was a long stretch of motorway over 700 km, but driving was a breeze, it just flows, I knew I was going to get stopped when I had the customs police trailing me for a few kms before pulling me off the motorway for an inspection. All was fine though and we were soon on our way again, when we had decided we had done enough for the day we came off the motorway and stopped in a town called Siegburg to get a room and hotel, 1 had no food or rooms because it was festival, no 2 no food no 3 no rooms no 4 was strange conference centre place but we ended up leaving the town to go further and by now it was too late for food so a room was all we wanted and found the most fantastic inn which was perfect and I hope to stop there on the way back to enjoy it a bit more.
 

 
We then had a very short time passing through the Netherlands and Brussels and then we were in France, we had booked a hotel because it was very close to the ferry terminal, it was a horrid room, hard pressed to call it a hotel, but as we were leaving at 4am all we wanted was a shower and a bit of sleep, before getting on the ferry. The ferry crossing was fine and then we were in England ready to go back to our house and start the renovation work.
 
So would I recommend a four day road trip? Driving for hours every day you would really need to get on well with the person you do the trip with (Luckily I have that). You will need a decent soundtrack to listen to, but yes it was fun and a bit different to the normal 3 hour flight. When we do the trip back it will be nice to be a bit more relaxed and spend more time enjoying the places we travel through. On the whole it was quite an enjoyable trip.
 
As always, thank you for reading and please feel free to comment.
 
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The answer is the flashing red lights were on windturbines! We do have these in Bulgaria but they do not have flashing lights on!