From Olney to Calais

Monday, March 14, 2016
Calais, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France
After our nice stop over with the Attwood's we set off about 8:30am to drive to Dover. There is new bridge called the Dartford Crossing. This bridge is such a rip off. There are no signs to say that you will be charged 2.50 for crossing over and if you don't pay by midnight the next day there is a 70 pound fine. I've just remembered and paid for it... there is an item on the net that says the bridge is raking in more fines than the traffic fines at the moment. Nice for people like me who don't know about it. I was lucky that Michele told me before I left her place. Apparently they have put up 50 signs, so maybe I'm just blind! We arrived in Dover and then couldn't find where to drop off the car. The multi storey carpark is being renovated and has been closed since last September so after driving through the customs section where cars are loaded and having our passports stamped for France, we had to get back out of the port and then I walked for about a klm and eventually asked one of the painters. He told me to park where the taxis go and ask in the terminal. Apparently we were supposed to park the car way over in the distance and walk to the terminal... who knew. I dropped Graeme off at the terminal so he wouldn't have to walk and then had to tidy up the messy car and make sure I had all the junk that we had been carrying around for a week, push a heavy bag, a backpack and a plastic bag full of 'stuff' back to the terminal. We picked up our tickets and because we were a bit early they put us onto an earlier sailing. We caught the terminal bus out to the ferry and had to go through customs again so we managed to get our passports stamped TWICE. We also managed to get onto the boat first as everyone else was parking their cars and scored a seat right by the front window. The crossing was fairly uneventful and 90 minutes later, we arrived in Calais. We waited for the bus to take us to the terminal and then a half an hour for the Europcar lady to come back and finally picked up our car. I paid and extra 50 euros for an automatic car as I was VERY nervous about driving on the wrong side of the road. As it turned out my fears were realised. I went down a one-way street... the WRONG way, bumped the curb, hit a rubbish bin and finally found a spot to park the car... I think I may have done some damage to the car!!! We finally found the hotel only to be told that they had no booking for us. I produced my confirmation documentation and they found us a room... the last one. We were really tired and I was stressed from the driving, so I did a huge lot of washing and fell into bed. We were lucky that we found a whole bunch of English speaking channels and watched some telly before crashing out. I hope I have better luck with the car tomorrow.
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