Thursday 5 February: Wissant

Where’s Bertie? He’s in the Aire at Wissant (France), at a cost of €11 (including 50c tourist tax each).

Weather: Rain

What a hectic 36 hours! At 11am yesterday we were sitting having coffee and a crossword in town, on our way to the supermarket, with no expectation that we would be in France by the end of today. Indeed, we’d just about given up on our Jan/Feb trip to Spain this year.

I’d originally booked our Chunnel tickets back in November, to cross on 10 January. The spanner that got thrown in that works was that I found a lump in my breast when we were in Wales at the end of December. I wasn’t overly concerned, sure by its traits that it was a cyst, but thought I’d best let the doctor confirm that.

The doctor wasn’t particularly reassuring, and referred me to the breast clinic on a 2 week wait basis. This still gave time to get my appointment through, get the all-clear and be off to Spain on our 10 January booking ... except that the appointment finally came through for 3.5 weeks later. So, the booking was moved, such that I would attend my appointment, they’d confirm it was a cyst, either drain it or not, immediately discharge me, and we’d be on our way three days later.

The fly in that ointment was that they found an atypical cyst, and thus it required a biopsy. The consultant’s opinion was that it would be unwise to remove myself to Spain whilst awaiting the result. So, we moved our outbound ticket to August, figuring that would give us flexibility to either move it forward again, or use it in the summer (but completely forgetting that I’ve entered a race one week after the date that I moved it to – doh!).

When I received a phone call just before lunch yesterday, confirming that the biopsy had come back clear, we quickly looked at a calendar. Was there still time to make a trip to Spain a reasonable thing to do, considering that our return date was fixed and unmoveable? Yes, we decided, there was.

A frantic afternoon ensued, firstly sorting out travel insurance, then moving our Chunnel ticket once again, then packing in such a disorganised fashion that you’d think we’d never packed for a trip before in our lives. An equally frantic morning ensued today - a stark contrast to our usual take-a-few-days-about-it approach to packing. Half an hour ahead of schedule we jumped into Bertie and were off. We are yet to discover what we have forgotten, but I’ll be surprised if we managed to remember everything*. 

We arrived at the Eurotunnel terminal early enough to be offered a crossing 2 hours before the one we’d booked, at 1916 but half an hour later, the departure boards told us it was moved to 2016  (the App confirmed the rescheduling whilst simultaneously saying there were no delays, so apparently moving the time of a crossing doesn’t count as a delay). At 1915 our crossing suddenly changed back from 2016 to 1916 with the status ‘Boarding Closed’! We finally set out under the sea at around 2040, so still earlier than we had been booked, but an annoying set of circumstances, given that if we’d ignored the information on the board and just proceeded to the departure lanes, we would have crossed so much earlier.

With the time difference, it will be a late arrival in Wissant, but less painful than the alternative option we considered, which was the 0320 crossing tomorrow morning.  

(*yes, we do have a comprehensive checklist, but it wouldn’t be possible to cover everything. By way of an example, Mick picked up our Euro notes yesterday, but it was only in the middle of the night that I suddenly thought that our ‘float’ bag of Euro coins was probably no longer in Bertie, and whilst going without it wouldn’t have been disaster, but as we don’t tend to use cash on a day-to-day basis to accumulate change, it’s good to hold onto a stash of coins for things like the laundrette.)