I’m putting two days in one. Because I realized these are both going to be very short and with almost no photos, so hey here’s a combo of two posts. Couldn’t decide on a title so I used both.

So the only problem with going to Lisbon at the end of vacation, was that it left my family trying to get back up to Lille in two days. From Portugal. Basically 12 hour drives for two days. Yay. Who decided to go to Portugal again?

We were all tired and cranky and not happy about the drive. Even less so once we discovered that Europe is awesome because you cannot find anything open on New Years… seriously.

Most of the day was quite boring. Driving and trying to find a place to eat. We ended up at a Burger King that was open somehow. So burgers and a some ice cream treats, though I still will say I really miss American milkshakes. Europe doesn’t know how to make them.

We stopped just over the border in France and stayed in another B&B to keep things cheap. Over all, a very sad and boring day.

The next day wasn’t much better. We bought some things at a grocery store for a picnic lunch. Well…picnic as in we all shoved food in our mouth at a picnic table in a rest stop, while shivering and wishing we were back in the car. Portugal and Spain had been amazing, but they did not prepare us for the cold and rainy French weather.

On top of that, we managed to hit the worst possible traffic you can hit. Essentially, imagine all French people returning to their homes after two weeks of Christmas vacation… on a Monday afternoon. Going through Paris. I’ll show you what our GPS looked like. It was a mess of accident and traffic symbols, trying to warn us around the mess that was Paris.

Yes, so most of our time that day was spent simply sitting in the car waiting for cars to move so we could go on our way.

We ended up stopping at a Flunch for dinner, before heading to a B&B in Tourcoing for the night. I had determined that I actually didn’t have class yet, so it was possible for me to stay another night with my family even though school was starting back up. So with that in mind, we settled in for the night, all tired and glad to be done with the insane amounts of driving.