It all started with where it always starts... shopping. We decided to go to the hypermarkets in Calais where you can buy up to 80 bottles of cheap booze and car load amounts of everything else to take back to England with you.
The port of Calais from the Ferry
The White Cliffs of Dover, taken from the Ferry.
We are planning on having a champagne and cheese house warming party for the 10 people we now know in London, so we bought a dozen bottles of champagne at this insanely large French Costco-esque hypermarket. A bottle of champas is about £3. We also bought 5 bottles of bordeaux, 6 tubs of French butter (by far superior to English butter),a stack of french chocolates, £30 worth of French soap and moisturising creams etc and a 1 dozen cans of tuna in olive oil and 5 French jams.
After loading this all in the back of our tiny car we sensibly allowed 40 mins to get ourselves to the docks before checkin closed, roughly 5 mins away. Or it would have been if I didn't confidently direct Booba onto a hyper- freeway in the wrong direction that took 20 mins for us to get to the first exit.
When we finally got to the first exit, and after much shouting at me, Booba exited and decided to give me yet another talking to about how to read a map. I responded by telling him that he could continue to yell at me once we got back onto the freeway, but he ignored me, and then proceeded to drive at 90 miles an hour past the entrance in completely the wrong direction. Once we finally got back onto the freeway and were heading in the correct direction, I laughed for about 15 mins of the 20 min drive.
We arrived at the Docks in Calais with 10 mins to go before checkin closed, only to be put in a line of cars and made to wait 40 mins at customs. When we finally got to customs we had approximately 10 mins before our ship was due to leave, and we had missed the checkin closure by about 30 mins.
Heroically believing somehow we would still make it, we were then forced to wait another 6 mins in the checkin line, leaving us approximately 4 mins to get our car onto the boat.
When we finally got to the checkin counter, the confused French ferry person alerted us to the fact that Booba had booked us in for 2am that day, rather than 2pm that day, and we were 12 hours and 40 mins late.
So we paid to get on the next ship all the while Booba looking slightly sheepish after yelling at me for the last hour about how an actuary with 10 years of university and post grad study cannot read maps.
We then pulled into the freeway of about 10 lanes that gets cars onto and off the ship, where we had to wait 40 mins to board. Michael went to the bathroom which was basically a little block of toilets in the middle of the freeway, surrounded by shipping trucks and cars. He came back to the car about 35 mins later sweating and grumbling and shaking, because as it had turned out, the lock had broken whilst he was in the toilet, and he was forced to haul himself up and over the 7 ft tall heavy wooden door. He (of course) got stuck at the top, because he couldn't get his big legs through the space, and hung there trying not to fall on the concrete floor and break something. He eventually got down and arrived back at the car in quite a state.
I laughed all the way back to London.
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