After arriving on the ferry from Dover our first port of call was to get internet access, forgetting that it was New Years day in Dunkerque and everything was shut. We decided to head to Paris in the hopes that a city of it's size something would be open. Unfortunately not only were we wrong but with only a few hours practice at driving on the wrong side of the road (and all on a motorway) we found ourselves in the middle of Paris, with no internet, GPS or idea of how to get back out. We learnt the road rules very quickly and also not to take a campervan into the middle of Paris...

We continued south, with the intention of revisiting Paris when a) shops were open, and b) we were a lot more prepared, onto Lyon. We arrived in Lyon early the next morning to nice little city where the sun was now consistently shining. After a great deal of research we found a GPS that would suit all our needs (with the addition of some extra maps). We begun searching throughout the city jumping from free wifi location to the next attempting to find a store that sold it. Thankfully along the way we were given instructions (via pointing at pictures and locations on maps due to the language barrier) to a sporting store that sold this type of equipment. When we found the store 15 minutes later we were very excited until we were told we needed to go to the other store just down the road unbeknownst to us that this street had 5 of the same store selling different types of sporting equipment. Half an hour later, after meeting many friendly and helpful staff we found the specific store and purchased what we hoped would solve all our mapping needs especially considering the sales person convinced us to get the next version up which contained European maps. Unfortunately the batteries for the unit were sold in another of their stores, so back down the street we went revisiting our old friends in each store until we came to the correct one. Upon installing the batteries the excitement was palpable but short lived as we discovered that although it contained European maps it would not create routes on roads....

Our next step in what was fast becoming a long winded saga was to purchase and download the required map updates from Garmin only to find we were charged ~$50 more if we put Australia down as our address. Quickly changing this to the UK reduced the cost but we were now faced with the dilemma of downloading a 3GB file (we were initially under the impression it would be 90MB...) without any real internet connection. So again with no maps we headed southward for Spain using an out of date Google map route and road signs. But we made it unscathed...