Le Tour of decades
“we spoke to our respective wives to see if they wanted to come but they convinced us we’d be better off on our own”
We were sat in a pub after a MTB ride and thought what a good idea it would be for us to go to watch the Tour de France and drive to the Alps in our three classic VW Campers. Mine’s the blue and white ’70s Bay Window. It’s got a 1776cc motor and it’s been lowered with a Red9Design front beam and I call her Corina. My friend Wayne Phillips owns the ’80s T3 hightop with 18in wheels and a home-built kitchen, and Chris Pease, or Spud, as he’s known, has the ’90s T4. He’s lowered it and has done a full self-build camper conversion which includes a pop-top, windows and home made CAD-built kitchen. We often attend VW shows together which generally means travelling down in one Van for the day but having been friends forever we thought it be great to take all three Vans on a road trip – the Tour of the Decades. We spoke to our respective wives to see if they wanted to come but they convinced us we’d be better off on our own. So, it was a jolly boys outing then!
Outward bound
And so it began on the morning of Saturday 14th July 2018. We were due to depart at 6am for Dover to catch the 13:55 ferry to Calais. Chris (Spud) was early as usual. Another friend, Rob Campbell, was travelling with me and we were on time. Wayne was predictably late so we eventually got away at 6:30 for our 224 mile drive from Worksop, Notts to the Dover ferry terminal.
We arrived at Dover around 13:00 stopping just outside the ferry port to fuel up and grab
