I’ve just watched out of the window as Portsmouth harbour moved smoothly away from us, next stop Caen! It feels good to be moving, but I’m feeling a little uneasy for some reason I can’t put my finger on.
It’s been not a bad couple of days, meandering from the festival site to the port. Without any time pressure, I had the flexibility to take an indirect route via a piece of road that appears regularly on the Harry’s Garage YouTube channel. And with nothing else to do I decided to film my van driving the same route.
What a bloody palaver!
I drove through it once just to identify it, found a place to turn around about a mile down the road, and drove back to it in the right direction for the shot I wanted. All that achieved was to identify a spot to put a camera, then I had to drive another mile to find another place to turn around so I could go back and place the camera.
That was easy enough, but now I was pointing in the wrong direction. So I had to start the camera, drive a mile, turn around, and then drive back past the camera. A mile later I had to turn around again, and go back to the camera, which I repositioned so I could film myself driving away from the spot.
Then repeat the whole process again, also filming the segment from inside the van as I went so I could stitch several shots together. The final sequence will be: – From inside the van, approaching the famous corner – from the roadside as the van approaches head on – inside the van as it goes out of shot from the roadside – from the roadside again as the van drives away – maybe a few more seconds from inside
This took probably an hour and a half, and what’s the first thing I did that morning. I was absolutely starving and went to a garden centre outside Burford for a full cooked breakfast. It was also a good spot to sit down and charge up all my devices and battery pack transferred files from the camera to my laptop etc. I don’t think I have enough battery capacity or solar panels to run even my simple setup.
Anyway, I can experiment with that as I go along. From Burford I then had 24 hours to get to Portsmouth, which was all pleasant enough except I had difficulty finding a spot to park overnight.
I picked this route because the cost is not much different from Dover to Calais, but it means hundreds of kilometers less driving to get to Spain. It’s a much longer crossing, but I would rather be in a big open space where I can move freely and stretch than sitting in the van for an even longer period.
Europe awaits! I don’t think I’ll be able to relax properly until my student finance payment is in the bank, but the next chapter is definitely beginning.