Just wasting time till our 2:30am departure to Basel via Dover-Calais so thought I'd pick your brains for ideas to keep the driver (my dad) occupied on the drive? We're driving tonight/tomorrow, dropping my stuff at my apartment then driving back Sunday.

I have the Puzzler crossword book to ask him the questions and fill it in for him but I'm a crossword freak myself and will really have to stop myself from just filling it in anyway!

Other than I-spy and singing to him (which he really wouldn't appreciate!) I don't really know what else I can do. Our other co-traveller is planning to sleep the whole way so he's not much use.

Any ideas???

Maybe a game like count the red cars, once it's dawn...

hmmmm, thats the game i play with my son, who is 5. I wonder how my 59 year old dad will enjoy it! I'll give it a go though

Well, that is a little better than my Nieces car game......hitting each other evreytime you see a yellow car...needless to say after the drive from Dunkirk to Basel, i have a very numb arm and 200 bruises.....Im just dreading the day it changes to silver cars...
I actually find the time goes quicker, when im with my Son and he holds the sat nav telling me how much longer and how many more miles there are to go on each road,we always cheer when we finish a huge stretch...and we sing alot of course!! Good luck and safe journey....it will be my turn in 3 weeks!!

Thank god there are only a few yellow cars on the road then!

I did a lot of map reading v's the sat nav too... it did make the journey a bit more interesting and you also notice the town names a lot more than if you were just driving through them.

Dunkirk-Basel is a hell of a long drive though! Where will you get the ferry from/to? Do you know which route you'll be taking once on that side of the channel?

Watch out for the multi coloured triangles of doom.

(if your going the Reims/Metz way)

I drive from Basel to Dunkirk,get Norfolk Line Ferry to Dover,Dunkirk is about 30 mins nearer to Basel the way i go, then calais is,also have it down to just 1 toll to pay!I can do it in about 7 hrs to Dunkirk,then i have another 5hrs the other side to Southport. I do the whole trip in one when going to the U.K and on return i stay in the premier inn near Dover ferryport just for the night.... mainly so i can stock up at Tescos 2 mins away fom the Ferry...

Hope your trip is better than mine, when i drove to Switzerland.

I took the Ferry Hull-Zeebrügge, and while i was still in Belgium, i got a problem with the cooling system in my car. Somewhere in Belgium near Luxemburg to Zürich took 18 hours. Every time it was uphill, my car overheated and i had to stop, let the car cool down, find some water, and go 10 20 km later it was overheating again.

Doc.

I think anyones trip has to be better than yours, poor Doc I bet a few choice words were spoken!!...

Our sat nav took us via Reims on the way there, and it slowed us down massively due to road works in the town. We avoided it on the way back and went via luxembourg/brussels.

Do you do the drive often then ?

We managed to make it back without hitting any tolls and the scenery was simply beautiful via Epinal. We did hit a toll at Colmar on the way out though, although the sat nav was programmed to avoid the tolls!

I have done the drive about 6 times since Easyjet stopped the Liverpool- Basel route. I will be driving again in June... Luxemborg/brussels is the way i go and Colmar was the toll. When i avoided all tolls, it took about 90 mins longer..and as you will know, evrey min saved is a bonus on that drive!..

Done the trip many times. My favourite route to Calais is Mulhouse-Epinal-Nancy-Bar le Duc Reims. costs around 20E in tolls one way. The d-road road between Bar-le-Duc and Reims is amazingly straight and much faster than your route planner or sat nav will assume. Ive done Calais to Waedenswil in 07:20 by this route without driving at silly speeds before the Uetliberg tunnel was open

Dont do Norfolk lines anymore coz of the extra time taken to get to Dunkirk, slower loading and longer crossing. But I found it quicker to go via Reims as for Calais. The Belgium Luxemberg route is further and uses more fuel but it has hardly any toll sections and you can fill up cheaply in Luxemberg. On the downside it is nearly all sleep inducing dual carriageway.

It's not. It's 31km shorter actually.

Wow, I guess we were lucky last weekend when we drove (in a yellow car) to Reims, stopped there overnight, then left late the next morning with no traffic from the road work.

A good game to play when driving through France is the number plate game. Details here. It acyually took me a couple of years to finish the game, so no chance of winning in just one night. A bit dangerous for the driver to play...

Tip, if your car over heats, a good way of cooling it down without stopping , is to turn on the heating , move all the dials to full and blowers on fast open all the vents and of course your windows ( unless its cold outside) youll find the engine cools down very quickly and saves you havingt to stop.

You must be comparing to the all autoroute via Metz which I don't take. The route I detailed is a whopping 82km shorter than that and doesn't seem to incur any time penalty.

I drive for a living, and obviously look for the cheapest route, but time is also an important factor, using Norfolk Line does actually take much longer for a few reasons.

1) Longer crossing 2hrs + as against P&O 90 mins
2) Less frequent crossings, every 2 hours
3) The road from Dunkerque port to the E40 is extremely slow compared to Calais.

The shortest route is approx. 410 miles though it will add about an hour to your journey against approx. 450 miles going via Luxembourg. The benefits of going via Luxembourg are virtually no tolls and cheap fuel, 81 cents for diesel at the weekend against €1.09 in France.

Hate to be the 'topper', but I think I might be able to beat you there Doc!
I drove my car to Basel from Warrington for the first time over the new year, during the really deep freeze.
Having left Warrington nice an early (5am-ish) heading for Dover, I got almost to Birmingham before I realised I'd forgotten my wallet!

So, I turned around, drove all the way back, retrieved said wallet, then set off again having wasted 2 hours and a good amount of fuel.
I then got slowed down by accidents several times (lots of ice and fog around), eventually making it to Dover around 1, with not a lot of time to spare before the ferry left.

The ferry ride was terrible - the channel was very rough, the ship was bouncing all over the show, and there was a good puke smell going onboard as well!

Finally got to Calais and set off as fast as possible for Basel in the rapidly descending dark, following what my TomTom claimed was the fastest route (all though France, via Strasbourg). All went well for about an hour, then the anti-freeze screen wash I'd bought (good down to -30C, according to the bottle) froze! Oh, and it broke the windscreen washer nozzles as it did, so when they eventually defrosted a couple of days later they didn't work anymore and had to be replaced.

This wouldn't have been so bad, except the gritters were out in force and were pouring a LOT of salt on the road. So much so that my windscreen kept getting encrusted to the point where I couldn't see where I was going - I wound up having to stop and pretty much every services to scrap it off!

I eventually reached Swiss Customs at half 2 the following morning, and spent a good 45 mins trying to sort the import paperwork for the car with a customs guard who didn't speak much English, with me speaking almost no German.
All told, the whole trip took about 22 hours...

Sorry mis-read your post.

I did that route once I think. I starting from near Ronchamp, where we'd been overnight for another reason.

Google maps is claiming 8hrs 58m for 769km though - guess thats based on 'legal' speeds on the d roads!
Cant remember what it took me - sure it wasn't that long though.