The holiday itself picked up a little Jimbo, unfortunately I think we'd picked just about the worst location possible, really cold at night, stoney beach and a great big train track running right outside our room!. I love a sandy beach on hols but this one was like walking on broken glass, the weather wasn't too bad during the day, we had a few poor days but otherwise not bad. I would never do the drive again though, hated it from the minute we hit the first toll road in France, managed to navigate our way around Paris with some issues and then the tolls just seemed to appear every few hours - on the way back we ended up in the streets of France trying to find a road which probably didn't exist anymore!. Wasted about an hour or so trying to get back on the right road, finally found it and arrived in Calais around 9pm Wednesday night - up 5am Thursday morning to catch the 6.30am ferry back to Dover and my bank card refused to work for the hotel, so had to pay by cash, forgot about the time differences and so missed our ferry but managed to get on the next one, the crossing was choppy as hell and when we did eventually get back to the UK I realised I probably wouldn't have enough cash to get us all the way back to Scotland so tried my card again but it refused point blank to work - had another card which I tried and managed to get £60 from that so was enough to make it!.
The language barrier was really terrible, although I know a bit of French it really was quite daunting at times, particularly when trying to fill up at petrol stations, here in the UK we're used to black diesel pumps, in France it's sometimes yellow pumps, othertimes black pumps with a yellow sign saying "gazonline". Not a nice feeling when your not sure what fuel you're pumping into your car - saw a poor guy in a car from the UK sitting at the side of the road on the way across with smoke bellowing from the exhaust, obviously put the wrong fuel in the car, nasty and expensive mistake to make!.
All in all, a good lesson for me I think, basically means if I can't fly to hols I'll be restricting myself to the UK cause I would never do that drive again and even at that I would need to go further down mainland Spain to get better weather and nicer beaches but given that it tool us 12 hours from Calais to Pineda De Mar (north Spain) I really don't see me doing this at all - couple of strong vallium from the docs before I get to the airport me thinks
Good to be back though
Marko
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