so we should have been at home in our beds at 0815 on sunday morning…but instead we were hauling all our gear onto a coach bound for Calais and then Manchester..some 890 odd miles away.
We had packed our bags full of snacks and goodies for the kids, charged all the DS consoles and phones and packed all our colouring and games materials in bags. It felt like we were leaving with a lot more than we came with..at least there was no weight restrictions on us this time.
I think my Dad may have been the last person on the bus and we were off…it stopped with us for about 10 minutes and then whisked off up the hill to collect other stranded people. We also collected some stragglers who had flown out with Easyjet and had no idea how they were going to get back. Neilson offered them places on our coach and I dont think i've ever seen anyone look so thrilled to be on a bus for something like 29 hours. God bless 'em. Unfortunately them getting on the bus meant that we lost one of our spare seats to them…..but hey, if i was in their position i would want someone to do the same for me…..
and besides there were at least two families at the back of the coach, who had got on before us, occupying way over their number of seats and doing the classic 'loads of bags on spare seat and look out the window or the floor' when the extra people got on. Whatever….'what comes around, goes around right?'
The trip down out of the mountain region was a bit eventful for a couple of other families..catcher's mitts needed for some spewy kids..fortunately not any of our hardened travellers..probably got something to do with being brought up in a city where there are a million speed bumps everywhere you go..
then it was just time for entertainment…..a lot of time…..
we had some very interesting characters driving our bus. I think they were pulling people of the streets to drive these buses! I can honestly say i think this guy you can see in the picture didn't stop talking from the moment they picked us up till we got to Manchester…..
we stopped for lunch and the drivers who by that stage had worked out that my dad can speak a bit of French which was useful as their english ran to 'no problemo!' They happily told us that they would be taking their linch break…we said 'one hour' they said 'no…one and a half'..which actually turned into more like 2. So we schlept about a service station waiting for them to come back from their french '90 minutes' 🙂
I have never been to a service station that was so busy..people, coaches everywhere all inappropriately dressed for the 19 degree sunshine we were sitting in.
i have to say though, the french services are much more imaginatively designed that the british ones…
Matilda catching up on some rest…..
We got to Calais at about 22.00. Starting to feel like we were nearly there…which was a little to premature as we were re-routed to a holding area for coaches which had about 20 full coaches already sitting there. We then waited..and waited and waited…and no-one knew what was going on.
Eventually we moved to the port and went through immigration. At which point we all discovered that one of the drivers was actually tunisian not French..which is fine…unless you are trying to enter the UK without a Visa..which he was..so with their resident translator in tow they all went into the immigration and we were all left wondering how we were going to get to the UK with one driver. Miraculously they gave him a 48 hour visa to drive the coach and a warning..phew…
then we moved forward into the waiting area for the ferry and got very excited to see a ferry waiting….but for some reason we were not getting on that ferry..we had to wait for the 5am ferry (this was about midnight ish!) ..so we waited and waited…
it was a blessing that the kids had fallen asleep by this stage but and so had much of the coach passengers including a guy who was trying to raise the dead with his snoring…..
Im no stranger to staying up all night after all but actually trying to sleep and being kept awake by the roaring, belly snores was a bit too much for me and I gave up and got off the coach and wondered around the quiet lines of cars and coaches waiting with us…i took the picture just as i got off, the clock says 1.59am
I discovered the french red cross were giving out hot chocolate and coffee at the quayside.
we arrived in Dover at about 5.30 having travelled on Seafrance ferries which are quite frankly lousy. No cafe open on board..i was hoping we could get the kids a bowl of cereal before the next bit of our journey. We all catnapped onboard and then some of us got to sleep a bit more on the coach on the other side…
we dropped mum and dad at Dover. I think they almost had to jump from the coach, the drivers were not keen on deviating from their direct route to Manchester.
Then we carried on to Manchester. A run from Dover that we know very very well…..
a tired but happy face…
he came unstuck from this once in a while…
back to manchester airport at about 1pm. The drivers gave us a little tour of the terminals at manchester as they didn't appear to know where to go and then they dumped us at departures and disappeared..no doubt needing to get some sleep and get out of the country before our fella's visa ran out…
Then we visited a deserted departure lounge to use the toilets and our transfer taxi was waiting for us to take us home…
We got home 29 hours after we left Flaine. The kids did a great. I think they just understood that there was nothing else we could do, no other way of getting home. So we just had to get on with it. Considering we weren't stranded away from each other, we were being supported by our tour operator to get us home, we weren't shelling out huge amounts of money to stay in hotels and we didn't need to rely on aircrafts to get us home like people over the atlantic….we thought we were in a pretty good position really.
phew..what an adventure…
🙂
