It was the big day today, and I woke to it feeling like I wanted to cover my head with a pillow like a small child, in the hope that the big, complicated and demanding world would go away. This was not the romantic and faintly heroic beginning of a grand adventure that I had imagined to myself. It didn't help that I'd set the alarm for six o'clock (I'm not a morning person), and I spent my first supposedly waking hour wandering around like a zombie and needing a good grouch. The rest of the morning was devoted to dealing with various last-minute panics before I finally set out at quarter to eleven to ride down to Dover for the ferry to France. At the ferry port I was pulled over for a customs check which somehow didn't happen. The custom's officer's look when she saw the amount of gear all piled up on the bike spoke volumes. She settled for asking me a couple of brief questions, to which she got even briefer answers, and then waved me through. Dover was misty and unremarkable. Even the castle looked drab and unromantic - despite the mist. The crossing, too, passed off without notable incident. All the excitable bits of me were still refusing to come out. Instead of standing on the deck feeling the salt air and the sense of freedom blowing all about me, I went into the bar and used the onboard wi-fi to sort out a route down to Reims. I am still having problems with modern technology. I even managed to confuse the guy in the information office. The crossing passed in a flurry of frustration and bad temper. I rolled off the ferry and headed straight down the A26 to Epernay, just outside Reims, arriving just after dark. Here I experienced my first act of kindness directed towards me as a stranger. Having spent half an hour wandering round this warren of a town looking for the municipal campsite, a cheerful guy in a (white) van shouted across to me and offered his help. When I explained what I was looking for, he just said 'follow me,' and hit the pedal. He led me miles around town to the campsite, which turned out to be closed! I felt almost bad for him, after his good deed, but he went off cheerfully enough. I'm now holed up in a nearby cheap but comfortable hotel, still trying to get my head around all this technology. I had to ask the receptionist to help with the hotel wi-fi. Maybe my circuits are just incompatible with modernity. The ride down to Epernay, though, was a pleasure. I like the simplicity and sweep of French motorways - so much more civilised than English ones - and much less busy. They never stress me. The landscape of Northern France, though, is alien to my English eyes: mile upon mile of broad, rolling hills, all pale greens, and browns and off whites, and all given over to agribusiness, with nothing to interrupt your view, often to the horizon, not a single tree or hedge or house or wall. Yet for all its bareness, it is extremely well groomed. What trees there are run in neat, measured rows, the fields are always tidy, farm building suggest an sense of order - a million miles from the pocket-sized and joyously scruffy landscapes of my English lowland home. It all felt very alien - at least until I caught sight of the graffiti on the side of a motorway bridge. That started to make me feel that I was still travelling through the same world that I had left this morning. In fact, I'm already beginning to relax into the journey, and that is very good going for me. Normally, it takes a week before I stop worrying about what could go wrong and trying to calculate in advance the number of ways I could possibly make an idiot of myself in a foreign land. Good omens. France is easy, as I've done it so many times before and can get by comfortably in the language. But I won't be in France for long. I'm heading directly south to Macon. There, I turn east into Italy. I don't know northern Italy at all and I can't speak of a word of the lingo. But somehow I don't care any more. Ciao.