OK, so look, the van is a piece of work and we’ve known this for some time but it decides when it wants to play ball and when it doesn’t. We drove from Croatia up to Trieste in Italy through Slovenia, parked up for a night and then carried on all the way to northern Italy just before Austria’s border without issue.

The ever changing scenery was amazing, it went from city to country, flat to mountains, summery to freezing frickin cold (yay) round every corner and it was such a fun drive just listening to music and preparing to be stopped at every border – we weren’t.

Anyways, then we entered Germany and joined the High speed traffic on the autobahn, with everyone seemlessly overtaking each other and driving along the mundane roads that makes the M5 look interesting. And the van didn’t want to do it. We pleaded with it, talked nicely to it and parked up for another night in the most freezing cold forest hoping it just needed a rest but no, the van wouldn’t play along.

So we slowly crawled into France and have put the van in for repairs. Now we’re staying in a town called Haguenau in a cute little hotel room waiting for the van to be fixed and you know what, we’ve gone from princess strops (luke) and moaning about being cold (me) to just enjoying and embracing another part of our trip.

The annoying thing is this town is really quaint and they’re in the middle of setting up their Christmas decorations and market – it opens Saturday, the van is ready Thursday. Seeing as there aren’t any Christmas markets open back home and we will be isolating for two weeks when we get back, the festive season will soon pass us by so it’s such a shame we haven’t managed to experience it.

But it still looks very pretty and we’re happy to have discovered a new town along the French/German border that we wouldn’t have known about if it weren’t for the van.

Fingers crossed we can restart the journey tomorrow though and be home at the weekend, and hopefully see a few more nice sights on the way.