Sunday 21 August - Bergues, France

Where's Bertie? He's in the municipal Aire at Bergues, where he's been quite a few times before.
Weather: Few spots of rain during the 45-minute drive here from the Chunnel, but warm.

I'm not sure whether to despair of our procrastination and last-minute behaviour, or just accept it. You'd think, on recent performance, that I was the sort of person who would do homework on the bus on the way to school, whereas the reality was that I'd be the one handing it in the day after it was given. I seem to have lost that trait somewhere over the years.

Despite knowing since last summer that Bertie needed a new leisure battery and it having become an increasingly pressing issue since then, it was the first week in August before I ordered it*. I had it wired in by lunchtime the following day, but found that despite the footprint being on paper within millimetres of the old battery, the tie-down points weren't compatible. It was thus last Wednesday (T-3) by the time I had it ready to travel.

Then there was the renewal of my photo driving licence. I finally applied for my new one on Wednesday, not learning until the end of the process that my old one legally ceased to be valid immediately and that I was obligated to return it. That's not compatible with a European trip, where I may be required to produce it on the spot, as I was on the Spanish/French border in March this year, and law-breaking was looking like the best option, until on Saturday&* my new licence arrived with with 16 hours to spare (T-0.75).

This was not the end of cutting things fine (and I'll gloss over the multi-tasking of gluing the water diverter back onto Bertie's bathroom door whilst cooking tea on Saturday evening (T-0.4) - a job that's needed doing for at least six months). The mobile phone issue took the biscuit. I'd ordered a new SIM mid-week, to give us more data to use than is available on our capped-roaming mobile phones, but it wasn't until Friday that it occurred to me that the old phone I'd intending using as a router is a 3G model, and the world has moved on quite a bit since then. Options were considered, stock levels nearly thwarted us, and a quick change of plan on the hoof saw us loitering for half an hour outside of a Tesco, on our way to Folkestone, waiting for it to open, so that we could buy their cheapest 4G smartphone (T+1hr. I swear I have never been so disorganised before in my life).

With the phone sorted (kinda; I didn't have it fully up and running until around 9.30pm), we pootled merrily down to the M25, where we crawled slowly along pondering where ALL the people were going, visited friends in Crawley, then went onwards to the Eurotunnel terminal.

Traffic a-go-go 

When I booked our Chunnel last month, I went for the 2230 crossing (because it was the least expensive of the options; this is not a cheap time of year to be travelling), knowing we would use our usual tactic of arriving early and likely being offered an earlier crossing. Last time we Chunnelled (what do you mean, that's not a verb?!), in June, the check-in window was 1-4 hours in advance, so we timed ourselves to arrive on the dot of 1830. It was only when we were a good way through the journey that I saw that the check-in window had reduced back to the old 1-2 hours. We decided to chance the earlier arrival; worst case - we would be sent away.

We weren't sent away, but only crossings within 2 hours of our booked one were being offered at no cost (to bring it forward to 1930 they wanted £93). It worked out well: we parked up, cooked and scoffed tea and had barely got the last mouthful down when our shuttle was called. So efficient was it getting through the two borders and customs, that we got into the queue for the crossing before ours, and were on a moving train at 2015.

It was, of course, dark by the time we arrived in France and our fingers were crossed that there would be space in the Aire at Bergues, a 45-minute drive away. Initial indications weren't good, when we passed a motorhome parked just outside the entrance, but those indications were misleading - there were at least two spaces remaining, plus a bit of room in the middle, had we been desperate.

After a busy few days (Saturday had involved volunteering at parkrun followed by a quick day-trip up to see Ma-in-Law in Halifax), we took a bit of winding down time before we crawled into bed after the clock had struck midnight, but still earlier than we would have even arrived in France, had we been on our booked crossing.

^{(*In my defence, I did a lot of research on batteries in January and I would have sorted it before we went to Spain if it hadn't been for the chosen model being out of stock. I redid the research in July and decided that rather than spending £1200 on a new lithium system, we would go down the route of least resistance, not need to replace all of Bertie's chargers, and only spend #200 on a replacement AGM, but with 50% more capacity.
**The photo driving licence renewal system is fully automated for those holding a valid passport. This can be ridiculous in some circumstances. When Mick had to renew his licence in 2020 his photo was duly taken from his passport. His passport was 2 weeks younger than his old driving licence, and used a photo taken at the same time as his driving licence one. The reason one has to have a new photo card every ten years is because appearances change, yet DVLA was happy to issue a new licence carrying the same photo as the old one.)}