I set off on my Dutch Road trip yesterday at 06:30, having stayed in a hotel just off the M26 on Thursday night.

The actual journey was 9 hours (about 5 hours of actual driving time). I’ve condensed that in to one much shorter video – so you can get a taste of the route I took.

So – here’s my video – showing my journey from the UK to the Netherlands in just 30 minutes.

It was a fairly simple drive – and essentially there were 3 different sections to the route I took. The The French and Balgian motorways, then round the Ghent Ring Road, and then in to the Netherlands and up to Schouwen-Duiveland.

Coming out of Calais I joined the Autoroute (motorway) A16 and within an hour I had crossed in to Belgium, the A16 now becoming the A18. I stopped briefly in De Panne on the coast – then continued on the motorway until I reached the A10 (just 30 minutes of driving).

Another stop in a service station to grab a quick sandwhich, then I was back on the road. Within another 40 minutes I was turning off the A10 on to the R4, the Ghent Ring-Road, part of which is full motorway standard, part of which turned out to be very slow yesterday.

I spent most of the time on the R4 ignoring what the Sat Nav was telling me, because it was trying to route me round the long way – via Antwerp – avoiding the toll tunnel  but adding an extra 2 hours to the journey time. Eventually, while stopped at a set of lights, I managed to reprogramme the sat nav and it was routing me where I wanted to go.

After crossing in to the Netherlands I was travelling mainly on the ‘N’ roads, with a short stretch of motorway. I crossed under the Western Scheldt estuary using the Westerscheldetunnel, then after crossing on to the island of Noord-Beveland I drove over the Zeeland Bridge on to the island of Schouwen-Duiveland – my final destination being Noordgouwe in the middle of the island.

On arrival in my accomodation the host met me and showed me to the apartment – in the attic of the garage! I unpacked my stuff and had a bit of a rest after all that driving.

Tomorrow I’m just going to trundle about locally. On Sunday I’m going up to Amsterdam, then on Monday I’m driving all the way back to sunny England.

FH.