We were a little nervous about the journey home as the trip down had taken considerably longer that we’d envisaged.
We decided on a 4.30am start and to ensure that the sat-nav didn’t try to take us through Paris as it had last year.
I did the first shift behind the wheel and it wasn’t a happy session to start with. Traffic was light, but we got stuck behind some slow French drivers (yes, such a thing exists) and then it was quite foggy in places which meant I had to keep a check on speed.
After Lyon, and with the sun coming up, the mist cleared and I was able to set the cruise control at 80mph and gain some time. Average speed rose quickly and we were well on the way by the time Sam took over. We managed to thwart the sat-nav’s evil plans for a trip around the Paris ring road and arrived in Calais over an hour ahead of our ferry check-in time.
There had been some mind games with the sat-nav. It was determined we should skirt Paris and when we ignored the first turning, it calculated a longer drive time and laid plans for us to turn off on the next. Ignoring that made it recalculate again, but it was determined that Paris was the best route and it recalculated an extended journey time based on us still heading through Paris. That caused us to have, at one stage, a journey time that meant we’d miss our ferry. We stuck to our guns and once the sat-nav was certain there was no chance of going via Paris, it chopped a couple of hours off the journey time. It was a seminal moment - I’d been right and it had been wrong. A humble apology would have been nice, but all I got was a grudging recalculation.
P&O Ferries got major future credit by letting us on an earlier ferry without additional payment, so we’d be home much earlier. It was an uneventful crossing, but the ferry was full of old people (very old people) who seemed to be having much difficulty in getting about. I was feeling quite gloomy about lots of things.
Tom and Hannah’s marriage break-up was obviously prime among these; I was worried about Tom and also upset for Hannah. Margaret had taken it badly (of course) and had also been disappointed not to come on the ski holiday because Gravel was poorly. On top of everything, she was still worried about Gravel who was now on medication for hyperthyroidism, but still not showing many signs of improvement. All-in-all, I couldn’t wait to be home.
There was one bit of bright news in all of this worry and that was that Max had been offered a job at Dulwich College, one of the UK’s top private schools. Every cloud ...
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