Jailbreak - reaching the continent!

Friday morning we were up not-so-bright but early to jump on the unsuspecting truckers. Eventually Mladen stopped to give us a lift (despite huge language barriers... he was Bosnian!) and we were off to Dover! Mladen didn't realise we expected him to take us on the ferry, and he didn't understand any of the languages available to us so it was pretty hard to explain. He reluctantly let us stay with him, worried he would get stopped at the passport checks, but we sailed through them and on to the ferry!!! We were fairly glad when he said he'd stay in his lorry for the journey as he spent most of the time on the road looking at us and saying "schon" and "sexy ladies"...

Our main aim for this trip was to get off the island... and we'd done it! the excitement of watching the white cliffs of Dover fade into the distance was all too much and I attempted a nap. We got back off the ferry with Mladen, and although he was going to Italy (which would have been an awesome achievement for us) he had to resupply and he said he wouldn't get there until 3 days later. Therefore, with some relief on our part, we parted from him at a petrol station just outside the port of Calais. Mladen stepped up his sleazyness enough to ask Amina for a kiss before we left (!), on which note we hopped out of the van and searched for a new driver.

Nihat's lorry... home for the day

This is when we met Nihat. Nihat was Turkish and although he didn't speak much English, another driver translated that he was on his way to Frankfurt and should be there in 6 hours time. PERFECT! We could get to Frankfurt with a couple of hours to spare - plenty of time to have a look around and find somewhere to sleep. Once we were on the road, Nihat looked after us, despite our initial concerns about his rough, scruffy appearance, the language barrier and chain smoking. He gave us some life-saving red bull and even got out a portable DVD player and put a film on in English for us.
With Nihat we travelled through France to Belgium and in and out of the Netherlands.

Me with Jemma

cooking up a storm!

Initially, our progress was fast, and we were feeling very positive. Then we went on a massive detour to get to an Aldi (Nihat had been pointing out Aldi stores along the way... clearly a personal favourite). We were trying to figure out if he really DID say he needed to get some fish fingers or whether that was a mis-translation, when we pulled up on the roadside near a big car dealer. It turns out Nihat WAS buying fish fingers, and we were invited to the roadside fish finger picnic with his other lorry-driving friend, who's name sounded a lot like Jemma. Nihat stored a camping stove in the pull-out cupboard at the side of his van, filled a frying pan to the top with oil and made our fishy snacks. He actually filled two frying pans and fed most of the fish fingers (dripping with oil) to Amina and myself. We made ours into sandwiches, washed down with peach juice. We were aware we were massively behind schedule (we should have been in Frankfurt at this point) but the situation was still hilarious!

Back on the road we tried to ask Nihat how long until we would reach Frankfurt. We began to understand that he had nothing to collect in his van until Monday (he'd been 'weekended' as truckers say), so he was in no rush to get there. With time running out to reach a destination, we tried to explain that we'd like to be dropped in the next town. Before we knew what was happening, we were in a lay-by with Nihat telling us to get out. It had happened again. With little more than an hour until our time was up, Nihat had done a Mal on us.