Good morning from the M5 (Sedgemoor, of course) because this trip starts exactly how we travel: real life, real budget, and a bit of “did we plan this properly?” We drive the little 1200cc Beetle down to Heathrow Terminal 4, drop Dora off with friends, and then realise we’ve booked ourselves an hour hop to Paris… followed by an absolutely brutal 11–12 hour overnight layover at CDG. If you’re doing UK to Brazil with Air France, we talk through what we’d do differently next time (spoiler: two of you need to double-check the booking, and the smaller-airport-to-Paris option might be smarter if you can handle Ryanair’s baggage rules). Once we’re in Paris CDG Terminal 2E, everything shuts at 10pm and we’re basically living off water, vending machines and whatever “pot noodle” we can get our hands on. We also test new travel tech: the Honest eSIM (unlimited data, 5G, loads of essential apps working, and it auto-switches UK networks), which is exactly the kind of thing that makes budget travel less stressful. Then comes the surprise: Air France Economy on the long haul has a genuinely good first meal and yes—champagne for us “commoners.” The pasta tasted like spaghetti hoops and could’ve done with spice, but overall it was a 9/10 meal. The final “snack box” was a let-down (4/10), but we still made it to Brazil and we’re ready to squeeze every bit of adventure out of our 8-ish days there.