66 | AUGUST 2019 4x4
OUR 4X4S: SKODA KODIAQ
One of the good things about having a thermometer in
your car is that you can see what the temperature actually is. In the mornings,
we felt like it was practically freezing but would have thought that was only
our imaginations... just as in the middle of the day, we’d never have believed it
was actually as hot as thirty degrees, even though we were coming home with
sunburn. But there you are – sat here three months later with the heating on
and rain coming down, read it and weep...
the weather, so we weren’t unduly worried by the
complete lack of anything challenging as we set off
south. All there was to do was enjoy the view...
or at least, there would have been, but for about
the first fifty miles there’s absolutely nothing
worth looking at. So instead we played a game
of see-who-can-be-first-to-spot-a-car-that’s-not-
British, which isn’t what you’d call a classic in the
making though it was remarkable how far we had
to travel before seeing anything on French plates.
And take a guess at what it was? A Skoda Kodi-
aq, that’s what.
Feeling quite at home now, we settled into the
familiar continental road-trip pattern. Toll booths,
fuel stops, marZelling at how many different ¾a-
vours of Yop you can get... actually, the impressive
economy of the Kodiaq’s 2.0 TDI 150 engine
means fuel stops were less frequent, though it
did ask for oil a couple of hundred miles into the
journey. We’d already topped it up with AdBlue
before setting off (a surprisingly frequent task,
though at least the stuff is cheap), but that one
came as a bit of a surprise.
What we didn’t have was any change at all in
the weather. It was warm and sunny, then warm
and sunny some more. Ridiculously settled, all
the way. Literally the only remarkable thing that
happened, the whole way from Calais to our
southern base in Moliets-et-Maa, was that Skoda’s
sat-nav took us via Paris, so we had some chewy
traffic to get through. It neZer Uuite ground to a
halt, but the steady 85mph cruise you can safelyenNoy most eZerywhere else in the country defi-
nitely dropped right off.
A curiosity here is that the autoroute north of
the city has several bridges passing under Charles
de Gaulle airport, so you can be driving along and
all of a sudden your entire windscreen will be
filled with the Ziew of a .umbo taxiing oZer the
top of you. The people on board might be trav-
elling to somewhere more exotic and my word,
Paris is an ugly, ugly place when viewed from the
autoroute
but eZen in first class they won’t be
doing it in more comfort.
They won’t get to enjoy being served by the
world’s grumpiest woman, either. It was clearly
our own fault for being all Brit Abroad and going
into a Burger /ing, but there was too much to fitHome of the Whopper... and of a very
stout telling off if you try to pick up a
tray without prior authorisation. We
blame ourselves for venturing into a
burger chain when we were travel-
ling in a land with one of the world’s
most celebrated national cuisines, but
sometimes only cheap meat will do...