Saturday 23 March - Home

Where’s Bertie? He’s sitting on our drive at home, where he arrived via Thursday night at Cite Europe (a large shopping centre next to the Eurotunnel Terminal by Calais) and Friday night at a Caravan Club site just off the northern terminus of the M23 (S of London).

Leaving Neufchatel-en-Bray, on Thursday morning, the SatNav was programmed to Wissant with the intention going for lunch there, before continuing on to Cite Europe. The Aire at Wissant is a much nicer overnight stop than the one at Cite Europe (the latter is not an attractive location and suffers from people coming and going all night long, as the only reason most people would stay there is due to a late or early Tunnel crossing), but there were a few things we wanted to buy and we wanted to see what the EuroTunnel queues were like in view of the on-going French Custom’s industrial action.

It was always going to be tight to get to Wissant in time for lunch, and en-route we abandoned that plan. Plan B was a quick visit to Montreuil-sur-Mer (which, contrary to its name, is not on the coast). We’d not been there before, having been thwarted mid-journey last November by a road closure with an excessive diversion.

Our visit was only a couple of hours or so, and not nearly long enough to do the town justice. However, we did see enough to tell us that we will go back sometime to explore further.

Onwards to our night stop and our final approach was a little non-standard (SatNav’s fault) involving the ‘oh gosh, this isn’t where I need to be!’ emergency exit from the Eurotunnel check-in area. It turned out to be a very fortuitous bit of bad routing, as it informed us that: a) the delays only affected freight (lorries were queued back onto the Autoroute); and b) the sneaky direct access between Eurotunnel and Cite Europe, which Mick had read about, really is feasible.

We used that route to great effect yesterday morning, followed by an efficient passage through check-in, customs and border control. The rest of the process didn’t go as smoothly as usual, and would have been off-putting had it been our first and only experience of the Tunnel, but we still managed to arrive back in the UK by 8am, slightly ahead of our booked arrival time.

It was on our way to pop in on a friend in Crawley that I decided that I couldn’t face the M25 on a Friday afternoon. Ten minutes later I’d researched and booked a Caravan Club site for the night. At £21.30, it highlights the difference in pricing between the UK and Europe (remember our entire week at Silves which came in at less than twice the price of one night here). It also highlighted that in future there’s no point in me booking a Friday morning Shuttle on the basis of price, if we’re then going to spend more than the saving staying in the SE so that we can drive north on the weekend.

My plans for what we were going to do with Friday afternoon went entirely out of the window in favour of lazing around, with the absolute highlight being use of the mains-water shower, with user-operated temperature control and which doesn’t involve a push-button or a payment meter. I had it unreasonably hot and stayed in there an unreasonably long time. Bliss!

That brings us to today, when we got about as early a start as is permitted (the campsite is protected by fearsome armoured barriers, only operational between 7am and 11pm). The early hour gave us an easy journey around the M25 as far as Byfleet, where we stopped for a parkrun*.

I can’t say much about the rest of the journey. I knitted and chose things for us to listen to. Mick drove. And here we are, back at home, where we were unusually efficient with the unpacking, having everything in the house within around half an hour of arrival. It will be a longer process to get stuff sorted and put away and to deal with the laundry mountain – probably just in time for us to be thinking about the next trip!

(* I can’t think that I’ve ever recognised anyone purely on their voice before, but when I heard a ‘Passing on your right!’ behind me on my second lap of the course, I thought ‘That’s Paul Sinton-Hewitt!’. He founded what is now parkrun and whilst I’d never met him before I have heard enough interviews with him to know his voice.)