Our first 90-day period within Europe draws to an end. Visa requirements mean that we can only stay 90 days in every 180-day period, and our adventure will have consumed all of them by the time we get back to Paris.

The last post was from Baumholder in Western Germany, and from there we had about a week to travel back to Paris to drop off our trusty Renault and then catch our flight to Cairo for the next phase of the grand journey. In this post we tell you about our stays in the cities of Metz, Reims, Chantilly and Senlis. Yet more pleasant surprises as we learnt about the fascinating histories of these places, and also enjoyed their modern charms.

We hope you enjoy these stories. They are a little delayed because of a combination of scratchy internet connectivity in Egypt, and having far too much to see and do on our tours there. But we've made good progress with the photo editing, and we have a bit of time at airports, so the next posts won't be far away.