Page 8 - TT2018 Official Routebook

Intro to TT2018 and Day 01 Friday – Calais to Flammerans

To marry up with the ‘Day a Week’ preamble to build the excitement for the big off for TT2018,
welcome to the new digital brochure format which I hope you will enjoy and for those of you who
like to keep a cursory eye on where we are each day and therefore become experts of course!!
Many of the roads we have done before on previous trips and France has always been our favourite
or at least the country we have frequented the most in the 15 years I have been doing these runs. 15
years is a round 50,000 Toad Tour miles so it’s hardly surprising that there aren’t many roads left
that we haven’t done but I have still managed to find a few for this trip!
There are two aspects that I really like about this year’s foray. Firstly, most of the hotels are new
although a couple of all-time favourites have been thrown in for good measure. (The Wedding
Chateaux made famous by Irish’s thong and butt cheeks and the Hotel in the Gorge du Verdon
where vigorous frothing in the bath springs to mind!!).

Secondly the roads are just stunning; I guarantee they are all very twisty. Some of the usual
Pathfinder’s gravel roads have been specifically avoided as the ‘V6 gay boys’ will be cherishing their
paintwork and, especially for the Dark Knight, the roads get progressively higher and higher, topping
out with the Col de l'Iseran at 2,770m. I don’t think there is a day where there isn’t a handful of all-
time favourites to retrace. Most of the time we will be out in the sticks, so I am sure there will be a
lot of nervous glances at ‘a-forever-reducing-fuel-gauge’, perhaps more so, for some, than others!

Well let’s kick off with Day01 which normally is considered, ‘a boring slog down the autoroute’.
Some of it is unavoidable but I have kept it to a minimum, so the usual autoroute antics will keep us
preoccupied and before we know it, we will be off onto the back roads.
Yes…we will be doing, what has become, the annual pilgrimage to the aging Grand Prix circuit at
Rheims but from a different direction this time to take in some of the circuit we have never driven
before.
After that, the usual Champagne run but once again, I have chosen
roads that are not normally frequented by Toad Tours. Then a short
section back on the autoroute and then off into the Forêt d'Orient
National Park as per last year but following the theme of new roads.
One thing that is great about France is there are always tons of
roads to choose from. Where ever we seem to be there’s normally
at least three roads that seem to go in roughly in the same direction and end up in the same
place….it could only happen in France.

From there we cut the triangle of the autoroute on the back roads tracking slightly further north
than in previous years allowing us to cross the autoroute some 5 miles north of Dijon. A blessing as
Dijon has never been kind to us traffic-wise. Then it’s country roads to the first new Hotel of the trip
and it looks like it could become ‘a-must-go-back-to’ hotel. Henry, I believe, is doing a forward recce
with the girls.