This was something of a spur-of-the-moment thing, “hey let's do a road trip!” and other than booking a return ferry crossing we had zero plans.
Here is the extensive vehicle preparations we undertook before embarking:
Which is basically all you need with a Freelander… we could've thrown some monster energy in but opted to buy that on-route to save weight ;) and besides, there's always disappointing service-station coffee as an alternative.
On the ferry we threw a few ideas round - we could go here or there, and then someone said “…but can you get there and back in 48h?” and someone else said “How far can you get in 48h?”… and that was the most interesting question so we decided on that.
As for direction of travel - we thought that it would be really cool if we could make it all the way down to Africa and back (blame TSD for suggesting it), so we set off in the general direction of down to see what happened.
Yeah it wasn't quite Cannonball Run and we were mostly just blatting along on the motorway in a diesel Freelander rather than getting up to high-octane shenanigans or sight-seeing… but it was a laugh and there were some photos, and this is them:

As we're homeward bound we looked for places to go through on our way back to spice it up a bit - Carcasonne was a short detour and is very cool.