Campervan Therapy

My Grandad would keep us children busy by getting us to race snails down the hill, guaranteeing hours of peace for the adults. So I channel my inner snail when we get the invite to Seán’s nephew, Jay Jay’s wedding to the lovely Iga in The Hague: Fran the Van must come too.

From Calais we tie ourselves up in knots in Dunkerque, looking for wine and cheese. The centre of this busy port is surprisingly charming, centred around an inland quays, rivers and canals.

Our first stop is in Belgium, near the unfortunately named, Plopsaland, in Adenkirke en Panne. The entrance to the campsite is marked by a tumbledown building and I expect tumbleweed to scoot across the reclaimed marshes, or Polders, as they’re called here. But the campsite is a green oasis and corkscrew-leafed willow trees are lovingly tended.

We follow the walking trail through fields of wheat and barley, edged in purple flowering vetch and poppies. Bees get busy in the bird’s foot trefoil and then we come to the stunning miles of sand dunes. We read that sand from here was used in WW1 to fill sandbags for the trenches and it hits us – we’re in Flanders.

Nightingales, willow and cricket warblers live in what is now a diverse environment of poplars, heath and rock rose, evening primrose and sea buckthorn. Butterflies land on the sand in front of us as we climb up and slide down dunes.

Morning, and we pass a WW1 cemetery outside the town. The war is never far from these Flanders’ fields. The traffic snakes around Antwerp and Rotterdam’s vast industrial ports  and I can’t help feeling guilty about how much fuel we guzzle.

But off the motorway, there’s peace: canals, windmills and plane tree-shaded bicycle tracks. Kijkduin, in The Hague, is a glorious, vast expanse of white, silky sand, the dunes covered in purple vetch and tall towers of yellow bloomed mullein. Ingenious bicycles, sporting huge tubs for transporting the whole family, trundle along dedicated tracks to the beach.

A delicious beetroot carpaccio, with smoked broad beans feeds us well, then it’s off to watch the cinematic sunset from one of the beach-side bars.

I’ve got to swim in the North Sea because I’ve never done it before, so the next morning I brace myself. Soon I’m jumping waves, the silky, cool sand under my feet. I gate-crash the Yoga group’s after-exercise swim because they’ll know the sea and it’ll be safe. Soon I’m energised, ready for the wedding.

The wedding day is glorious: a gorgeous couple, lovely company, food that keeps on coming, banging tunes and another sea-side sunset where the sky is every-shade from orange to peach, and lilac. The sun is a big orange balloon etched with the silhouettes of a wind turbine and a sailing boat. A moonlit-walk home ends this magical day.

As the ferry from Calais pulls into Dover, the iconic white cliffs glow against the blue sea and I think of all those WW1 soldiers coming home from Flanders and wonder what they felt.