We all reach Calais differently — some of you came down last night, some are driving to Folkestone this morning. The trip properly begins about two and a half hours later, at a roundabout in a field outside Reims. That’s Reims-Gueux: one of the fastest circuits in Europe, laid out on ordinary public roads between two villages, with its pits, timing tower and grandstands all still standing beside the D27. Cars on the pit straight, photographs taken, and then lunch on the A4 in the middle of Champagne.

An easy afternoon of it — the A4 running east through Champagne and Lorraine, with the last French fuel at Brumath before the river. You cross the Rhine at Iffezheim and the character changes completely: the B462, and then a set of unhurried K-roads climbing up through the northern Black Forest. The hotel sits above Bad Herrenalb with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn of forest around it, and the abbey ruins are a few minutes’ walk down the hill if there’s light left.

Straight into it: the L340 over the ridge out of Bad Herrenalb, the B296 down through Calw and the Enz valley, then on past Tübingen. After that the road climbs the Albtrauf — a forested escarpment four hundred metres high running clean across southern Germany — onto the Swabian Alb, a limestone plateau with the oldest figurative art on earth buried in caves beneath it. Lunch is at Marbach, the oldest state stud farm in Germany, where five hundred horses live on the hill and the paddocks are open to walk before you eat. Then down the Grosse Lautertal, the most castle-rich valley in the country — look up at Bichishausen — and east across to Schongau.

The best three hours of the day. The B472 runs along the very edge of the Alps with the mountains as a continuous wall on your right, all the way past Bad Tölz, and then the B307 climbs onto the Sudelfeld: twenty-three kilometres of open pass road at eleven hundred metres, treeless upland, one long sequence of curves that never tightens into hairpins. Coffee in the beer garden at the top of the Tatzelwurm with the Kaiser range in front of you. Then the hairpins drop you into the Inn valley, over the border at Niederndorf, along the lake at Walchsee and into Kitzbühel.

A short morning, because what’s at the end of it is worth being first to. South over the Pass Thurn at one thousand two hundred and seventy-four metres — the watershed the Bronze Age used to carry copper over — down to the lake at Zell am See for coffee, and fuel at Bruck before the mountain. Then the Grossglockner: the north ramp stacking its hairpins up behind you to the Fuscher Törl, and a spur climbing seven more to the Edelweissspitze at two thousand five hundred and seventy-one metres, the highest tarmac you can put a car on in Austria, with thirty-seven peaks and nineteen glaciers laid out in front of you. Go up in twos and threes — the car park is small and the last turn is tight.

Two more great roads, and they could hardly be less alike. The B164 runs west over the Dienten saddle with the Hochkönig and its glacier filling the windscreen — well surfaced, long flowing radii, a road that flatters a good car. Then north to Hallein and up onto the Rossfeld, the highest public through-road in Germany, which crosses into Austria and back again without anybody asking you anything, and a late lunch at one thousand five hundred and fifty-one metres with the Watzmann to the south-west and Salzburg down in its basin below. Then Berchtesgaden, the autobahn, and Munich — where you’re sleeping inside a locomotive repair hall and the halls stay open until ten.

This is the morning you get to stretch them. The A9 and the A3 run north-west across Bavaria and Franconia and long stretches of it carry no limit at all — the one part of the trip where the only thing setting your pace is you and the traffic. Coffee and fuel at Würzburg breaks it. Then off at Bingen onto the B9, the Rhine road, through Bacharach and Oberwesel and up onto the plateau at Urbar for a late lunch looking straight across at the Loreley. It’s the best table of the whole trip.

Sixty-five kilometres of river road, and it does not stop giving you things: Rheinfels above St. Goar, Katz and Maus facing each other across the water, the great loop of the Bopparder Hamm with the steepest vineyards in Germany beside it, Marksburg on its crag, and then Koblenz, where the Mosel comes in and Ehrenbreitstein stands a hundred and eighteen metres up on the far bank. North of the city the gorge opens into volcanic country, and at Brohl we turn inland up the valley the Romans quarried for stone and pick up the autobahn for the run into Düsseldorf. Tonight your car parks on the balcony outside your room — and then we go to dinner in a railway roundhouse.

The last day is a good one. Off the motorway at Erftstadt and straight into the Eifel: Nideggen first, a hill town on red sandstone cliffs above the Rur, then the valley lanes running along the edge of the national park. The B258 to Monschau has a trick in it — for about three kilometres it crosses Belgian soil with no junction onto any Belgian road, crossing the border six times in a few hundred metres, all because a Prussian railway trackbed was handed to Belgium in 1919. Monschau itself is three hundred and thirty protected buildings packed into a gorge. Then over the High Fens, the highest ground in Belgium, and down into the Ardennes to Spa-Francorchamps, where there’s a race meeting on and admission is free.

Fuel at La Source, where the bar upstairs looks down on the entrance to the track, and then the run home — the E42 west across Wallonia past Mons, and into the terminal at Coquelles. Follow the signs for Eurotunnel and Tunnel sous la Manche rather than Calais port, which is a different place altogether. Somewhere on that last motorway it tends to land that you’ve done four countries, seven passes and one thousand seven hundred miles since Wednesday. Thank you for coming — it’s been a proper trip.