Low-cost midlife crisis

The ferry finally docked about 40 minutes en retard and we waited to get off. Foot passengers, the forgotten children of the ferry, now have to wait until everybody else has gone, every car and lorry has driven off, before exiting. We got onto a bus, all 24 of us (by this time we all recognised each other – to the point where someone from the port got on the bus to check whether we were all there, we all knew that we were still waiting for big-suitcase-old-lady and scooter-girl). Once bsol and sg made it we were driven to the customs hall.

Passport control had already happened in Calais where we had been checked by both the marvellously French sounding PAF (Police aux frontières) and the always paramilitary sounding UK Border Force (I know that rebranding happened a long time ago now, but it still makes me cringe. I imagine before too long they’ll be reimagined as Priti Patel’s Stormtroopers), so at least we didn’t have to go through the uncertain wait time of that part of the border crossing process. I did however remind my travelling companions not to use mobile data any more to go online as now we had entered the sunlit uplands of the “sovereignty” fetishists, we were no longer covered by cheap roaming fees. WiFi only from now on.

Having satisfied my need to go on about the appalling government of my country of origin, however, I also need to make it clear that we had a very smooth journey once leaving the port. Firstly we got picked up by an 8 person taxi (along with father-and-daughter-from-York and Hungarian-woman-on-hiking-trip-to-Scotland) and taken to the station (for what seemed like a reasonable price) and then our trains worked out nearly perfectly (one guard at King’s Cross even saw us coming and kindly held the train for the extra 20 seconds we needed)

The one extra piece of interrail info that people arriving here need to know is that QR code technology hasn’t made it to the UK yet. So ticket collectors don’t have the right scanning machines for the tickets generated by the app (this doesn’t matter much as they can read them in the traditional way) but more importantly the gates that allow you to get on and off platforms don’t work and so you have to find a member of staff to let you through.