It would be nice if there was just one straight motorway running from Ypres to Karlsruhe. But there isn’t. Even using the satnav, we managed to get lost in Kortrijk, but at least managed to get a tank full of diesel at a much lower price than filling stations on the main roads. We managed to reach Luxemburg without too much trouble and, because the satnav sent us to Baden-Baden across the north-east corner of France in 2023 (somewhat stressful bcause the French police are after us for non-payment of a speeding ticket in 2018), I put Karlsruhe in the new machine. The route is a spaghetti of motorways, A-roads and minor roads, and a satnav is indispensable. We passed through Trier (where Karl Marx was born and where there was a horrendous witch-craze in the 1580’s with two villages left with only one female inhabitant left alive), Pirmassens, Landau and Kaiserslautern. There was a delightful area between Luxemburg and Pirmassens with rolling hills covered in dense forest. It had every shade of green and presumably there were numerous types of coniferous and deciduous tree. Some of the hills were quite high with vertical cliffs, and one had a castle on it.
Near Baden-Baden we stopped at the rastplatz where we had an appallingly bad meal last year, and opted to go to MacDonalds for a MacMenu. It could have been worse. We then drove for a further 30 miles south through a violent thunder storm and torrential rain before finding (after three attempts) a rastplatz with one small place left, and bedded down for the night.
