Getting to France

Keep your hands off the chocolates!
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Because the coach taking us to France was picking us ap in Lincoln (England) at 3.15am, my journey actually started the previous day. My friend, Linda, lives in an orchard between Lincoln and Newark so I travelled up to Newark by train, taking lulu-the-laptop with me to do some writing and a bit of surfing on the train. I must say that having Wi-Fi on trains is a wonderful thing. Actually, I travelled down and then up, as the only way I could get there was to go south to London and then get another train back north.

Linda met me at the railway station and took me to the caravan where she was in the middle of making Christmas chocolates. I was warned not to touch! There would be a couple of boxes of them for me to take home if I was good!

Keep your hands off the chocolates!

Later we drove to the local fish & chip restaurant for a take-away supper. Some idiot kept driving alongside us and giving us the finger. We think he was unhappy with Dave sticking to the speed limit.

With bags in the car and food in our tummies we settled down for a couple of hours nap before Dave drove us to Lincoln and stayed with us until the bus arrived. It was only 15 minutes late arriving. By 3.30am we were on our way.

Michael, our first driver was very nice but left us at Peterborough services we changed driver and the new guy drove on the cats' eyes all the way to Dover making sleep impossible and causing us some concern about his driving and level of wakefulness. Linda drew my attention to a man across the aisle who was wearing a very bad wig. I then noticed that he had a lot of thick hair growing out of his ears. It was horrible and I had to force myself to not look in that direction.

After the bus interchange we met our crew – Tony the driver and Rhonda the Tour Manager who were both very nice. They were both wearing festive Christmas hats and the windows of the coach all had tinsel with teddy bears and Christmas parcels tied to it. On the ferry Linda and I made straight for the restaurant and had a full English breakfast and a cup of tea before spending the rest of the crossing trying the perfumes and lipsticks in the Duty Free shop. I tried various perfumes, running out of bits of arm on which to try them and making good use of my handy wipes. I found some at half price and tried four or five then took my arms to Linda to sniff. She liked one only – and that was one I always used to wear.

Then the ferry arrived in Calais and we got back on the bus for the drive to Lille.