© Google Maps 2025
Sunday morning and it is time to return to the UK with the mission fully accomplished; we checked out of the NH at about 10:00AM and I showed my sister one last time around Zavantem, where the late Mrs F and I used to live; there are a couple of very nice shops along the main station street, including an excellent Irish bar and a couple of excellent cafes, the proprietor of one being our landlady when we lived there and she had a small terrier named after a bottle of wine (Petrus). Quite a character.. the other being the most phenomenal patisserie which would have you drooling whenever you walked past it if you ever had a sweet tooth; lastly the enclave of Zavantem had a small but charming church and almost opposite, within 2 minutes walk, a park with a well stocked duckpond.
The fact that there would be aircraft in and out with a regularity to make Heathrow blush for 18 hours of the day, (and the flightpaths were extremely close to the residential areas, for both the main and reserve runways) was incidental. At the time, certainly compared to a lot of other districts in Brussels, despite there being a small but rapidly growing Moroccan community, Zavantem was not a bad place to live and not especially prohibitively pricey either. You were pretty much only two hours away from anywhere else in Europe, which if you wanted to enjoy lots of travel away from Belgium was extremely handy.
Once this very short point and explain tour of Zavantem was done, it was time to resume the white knuckle journey onto the Brussels Ring 0 at the Zavantem/Hennaulaan junction. I took the wheel for this particular leg and headed back towards the city to the Ring 0 Flyover and turned right onto the Ring Road and took a deep breath.
Y’see the problem isnt so much getting onto the Ring Road itself, it is getting into the correct lane to avoid the Airport turn off while a significant amount of traffic approaching you at pace from your left hand side is trying to get into the lanes that you’re currently occupying so that it can get to the Airport.
I deliberately chose to undertake this return journey to the UK on a Sunday so that the traffic levels wouldnt be as mental as they would normally during a weekday, but the scars remain from before, LOLZ.
It is, putting it politely, character building. This part is known as R22, Ring 22. There is one lane on the inside (far left lane) that you have to be in, in order to get onto Ring 0 to get to Ghent, Bruge and our eventual destination for the day, Calais.
As soon as you go under the railway line to Brussels, you then join this single lane filter which then feeds you into Ring 0 and you then have 100 yds, if that, to feed into the rest of the fast moving traffic, and THEN, you feed onto the lane for the E40.
So…. lots of looking over your left shoulder and in the case of an XJS, relying on two things; one your passenger (because the buttresses at the back of the cabin obscure your view of the road behind and to your left) and two, the Sport button on the gearbox so that if you need to squirt your way out of trouble quickly, that you can do.
It is the one place in the world that I am aware of where you almost literally have to have eyes in the back of your arse to maintain full situational awareness and you really have to assume that every other road user around you is a nutter… and if they have a Belgian number plate, more often than not, they most likely are.
Within about 3 miles, once you’re past the airport and out of Mechelen, things start to settle down and you start a big (and I mean big, it goes on for ages) long climb up a viaduct over railway marshalling yards and a shipping canal at Vilvoorde, and once that is done, you can then breathe a lot easier.
Until you get to Asse. Yes. You read that right. At Asse is the turn off for the labyrithine Groot-Bijgaarten junction to get you onto the north west bound E40 proper and off Ring 0 once and for all.
Signs for Ghent, right hand lane (not farrrr right, that takes you to Asse, a salutory lesson for all puffins, LOLZ), then once you’re into that feeder lane, back over to the left hand lane to take signs for Ghent.
This swoops onto the E10/E40 at Groot Bijgaarten, more looking over your left shoulder and relying on your passenger for situational awareness and a foot firmly hovering over the loud pedal… and that, once you’re clear of Merelbeke, is pretty much it until Calais. There isnt an awful lot else to it, once you get out of the industrialised hinterlands of Brussels..
It becomes a lot more rural once you’re north of Brussels and past Ghent and Bruges. The road then bends more west-north-west and passes underneath the dinghy launching beaches of Dunkirk and Petit Synthe and Grand Synthe.
After about 90 minutes after leaving Brussels, you’re starting to see overhead road signs on the A16 for Calais Tunnel Sous La Manche. Almost there.
Left hand lane, keep going. After what seems like an eternity (you see the signs miles before you gt anywhere near the turn off), you come up to the green Tunnel s/La Manche sign on the right hand side and this takes you into the feeder lane back into the Eurotunnel complex.
And that is pretty much it. In through the Tourisme entrance, over the top of the motorway that you’ve just left, into the check-in lane and up to the booths to show your passports and your reservations, they give you the boarding pass and off you go.
From there, down to the terminal complex to get some water and supplies, await calling for your departure (in our case, 2pm), and then onto the train, again, loaded onto the downstairs part of the trucks.
I gave Alison the keys to the XJS and at that point, once we were back in Folkstone, the remainder of the journey was hers to complete. As is usually the case (I’d only ever known one trip to be delayed, in all the time that I’d ever used Le Shuttle, and todays was not going to be one of them), the journey was routine.
Once off at the other end, same journey as the way down in the first place; onto M20, M26, M25 to Junction 16, onto the M40, off at Junct 1 for Beaconsfield, north to Amersham then picking up the A413 through Great Missenden to Wendover and then Aylesbury. Just a shade over 2 to 2.5hrs, door to door from Folkestone.
Back to the house, kettle on, Alison then picked up her Mini that she’d left at the house for the previous week and she headed back off to Warwickshire.
And that was pretty much that. The end of The Italian Job, for now anyway. 1800 miles by my reckoning and there were ten border crossings; there were some minor scrapes along the way, but on the whole, the XJS performed flawlessly for the whole trip; there was one unreferenced instance where the amp meter dial seemed to malfunction, but the following day, it was alright. Never worked out how to explain that and it never caused me a problem again.
But for now… that was mission accomplished. I had set myself a target of a Grand Gesture to pay tribute to the woman who had changed my life, to give her some sort of thanks, some sort of grand send off to a beautiful location to spend the rest of her eternal days, to prove to myself and to the world how much I loved her… and I did it. With the love and help and support of my dearest friends and family, I did it.
I can see it for what it really was now, fourteen years later, it was the pathway along the Healing Process, but at the time…It was just something that I had to do.
© Fubar2 2025
