Did I forget something? Passports, Euros, driving licences, insurance and vehicle documents, ferry tickets? Oh yes, I knew there was something, I forgot to tell Lucy that we weren’t going to Lymington for our Easter break. I was internutting last Sunday and accidentally found the ferry booking page and all of a sudden we were booked for the Dover Calais ferry.
It was very difficult keeping up the pretence for four days, all the customers were asking where we were going and I had to make sure that Emma wasn’t coming to visit with Darcy but I am a master of deceit and all was good.
I’m afraid that it was Stella who gave the game away by directing us down the M2 instead of letting us go all the way round to the M3 and Lucy could see that something was up. I had to give her my secret box and as she opened it and saw the passports she suddenly realised that we were on a trial run of our future plan to tour Europe for the rest of our lives.
Once she settled down she was rather pleased with me and the questions started, where are we going, North, South or straight on?
All my plans catered for were getting us to Calais, after that it was a totally plan free 10 days in front of us.
We probably didn’t find the quietest aire in France to sleep in. We could see the aire from the ferry and it looked pretty ram jammed but thought we’d give it a try and see how we got on. Bearing in mind that you could throw a stone from the ferry terminal into the middle of the aire it was a surprise when the sat nav took us on a 10 mile excursion all the way around Calais and back in the other side. Okay, I did miss couple of turnings but that wasn’t all my fault – not.
Luckily we managed to slip into one of the last two spaces left and settled in for the night. The aire itself takes 50 units and there must have been another 20 parked outside in the car park. I was very surprised to see so many different makes of motorhome, out of our window we could see 10 motorhomes and they were all different makes.
Anyway, not only could you hear the ferries throughout the night but you could hear the onboard tannoy announcing in two languages that everyone should get down to the car deck. A couple of times the doors and windows in Frankie were shaking off their hinges as the ferry engines were put into reverse and this went on all night long.