Low-cost midlife crisis

16.05 – that was the time of our ferry out of Dover. Obviously we’d rather have been on a train, but see threads passim.

For a ferry, foot passengers have to check in 90 minutes in advance (it’s another of those anti-foot-passenger rules. The carbound only need to be there 60 minutes beforehand.) So our ultimate target was to be at Dover ferry port at 14.35. Previous experience on trains in England (see day 17) had made it clear that we needed to factor in a lot of extra time just in case. And so, as overly cautiously as it felt, we went to catch a train from the village station at 9.06. The app made it clear that if things went to plan we’d get to Dover Priory station at 11.42, giving us a cool 2 hours and 53 minutes to travel the fairly short distance from the railway station to the ferry terminal.

The train was a couple of minutes late, but we had so much time that this was of no matter. It trundled on through the villages of South Cambridgeshire and thence into the villages of North Hertfordshire. And then it stopped. Somewhere next to a field of wheat just outside Ashwell and Morden.

Time passed. I realised we’d miss our first train to Dover. But it didn’t seem terribly important. The second train to Dover, an hour later, would still get us there nearly 2 hours early. I wasn’t concerned. Time was very much on our side.

An announcement. There was something in the overhead cables ahead and we had to wait a bit more. Then the driver walked through our carriage going from the front to the back of the train. Then another announcement. “Due to the obstruction in the wires, we will return to Royston, until it is cleared”. We did, and then we all got off. At this point, on the platform, along with the thronging hordes, I learned what the obstruction was. A balloon. “A hot air balloon?” I asked the guard, hoping for an exotic and exciting reason for our delay. “No, a child’s balloon”

At Royston the announcement was that anyone wanting to go to London should go in the opposite direction to Cambridge, and then take a train from there on a different line, seemingly unencumbered by balloons, to Liverpool Street. The amount of time it takes to remove a balloon from the overhead cables is, apparently, unknown and unknowable. So we went back to Cambridge.

I checked with the information guy on Cambridge platform and he still had no news on the status of the rogue balloon, only knowing that the power had been turned off on the lines, but not being sure how long it would take an engineer to come out. I wondered how you would feel if you’d studied hard to become an engineer, perhaps attending a prestigious university and landing what seemed like a plum job with Network Rail, only to find out that much of your tasks involved removing balloons from cables.

Going to Liverpool Street was a much more complex route. Balloonline would take us to Kings Cross, right across the road from St Pancras, the station for Dover. Liverpool Street was much further away. And there was a tube strike. But in the end we felt we had no option but to go for the latter.

The train we had intended to catch from St Pancras to Dover went at 10.37. Obviously that was very much out of the question. The back up train went at 11.37 – and with our arrival at Liverpool Street scheduled for 11.45 that was also out. But I had cunningly left us enough time that the next one, at 12.37, would still get us to Dover with time to spare.

Miraculously, the train to Liverpool Street seemed to be running on time, smoothly, and with no problems. There were no random objects blocking our way. No toasters on the points, or crampons on the tracks. And as a result we arrived bang on schedule at 11.45, still 2 hours and 50 minutes before we needed to be at Dover ferry terminal.

As there was a tube strike, we needed to get a taxi. When you are travelling in a group of 5, London cabs are perfect as you can all get in them. But obviously as there was a tube strike there was also a queue. But it seemed to be moving reasonably fast, plus taxis get around quickly what with dedicated taxi and bus lanes, right?

As you may have guessed…I was wrong. We got into the cab around 12.05 and then sat in a lot of traffic. Half way there I realised we weren’t going to make it. I checked the app. The next possible train got us to Dover at 14.33, precisely 2 minutes before we should be at the ferry terminal. Things were beginning to go decidedly awry. Or rather they were in the middle of going decidedly awry.

We got to St Pancras, at about 12.45, and £28 lighter. I decided to call the ferry company to see how crucial this 90 minute thing was. The guy was singularly unhelpful. “I’m afraid I can’t help you”, he said, repeatedly. The bus for foot passengers leaves 90 minutes before the boat departs and that’s that. He offered to rebook us on the next ferry which left at half past five. I worked out that this would get us to Calais at around 8pm local time. I’d already ascertained that the last train from Calais to Lille (where we were booked to spend the night) left at 8.31. And foot passengers get off last. So that sounded like a disaster. He then told me that the cost to rebook was £64. I asked if I had any options and he revealed that I might be lucky and the bus wouldn’t have left or the staff at Dover might be able to help out. I decided to chance it.

However, we were now looking at around £200 on top of all the hassle and stress (plus I needed to find somewhere to stay in Calais). Just in case you have forgotten, this day from hell, which was by this stage potentially ripping a massive hole in our budget, was caused by

We got to Dover at 14.36ish. Piled into a taxi and were whisked to the terminal. We arrived at more or less exactly 14.45, 10 minutes after the 90 minute cut off time. The counter was closed up. This didn’t fit my plan of begging for mercy, since you actually need someone to beg to, and there was no one to be found. Begging in front of a closed window is rarely effective. E went round the corner and located some courtesy phones. So I picked the relevant one up. The guy on the other end asked if the window was open. I told him it wasn’t and he said he’d call through to get the person inside to open up and talk to me. This he obviously did and the woman who had been in there came out and started to explain again how we were too late. The bus had gone and we were too late. An Argentinian woman who had arrived at the same time as us explained how she was going to a wedding in Calais that evening and she’d flown all the way from Argentina to be there. Nothing worked. She told us that she could get us on the next boat (for free, actually, making it seem like the man on the phone earlier was really trying to pull a fast one) but that would be later.

A policeman walked in and I tried him too. “I understand that this is a border area but you could walk us over to the passport area, even in handcuffs if necessary” he laughed, but then after consulting with two colleagues seemed to think it was possible – the bus would still be at the passport place, he could get us there and then we could get on the bus with everyone else. (the handcuffs, he said, wouldn’t be necessary). Brilliant, a solution. “Are you checked in?” he asked. The ferry person confirmed that we weren’t (though that was because she hadn’t checked us in, so that seemed a bit unfair). The glimmer of hope unglimmered. He left, and the woman retreated back to her bunker letting us know when she’d be opening up to check us in to the next boat.

Without hope or expectation, I went to try the courtesy phone again. This time a woman answered. I laid it on thick, how we’d left early this morning to be there by 11, how we’d had a terrible journey with delays and cancellations (I considered mentioning the balloon but I felt it wouldn’t help our case), and how we had a place to stay booked in Lille which we wouldn’t get to on the later boat. She said she would see if she could find another bus driver and would talk to the woman there if she managed it.

The glimmer of hope began to faintly reglimmer. Could this work?

A couple of minutes later the door opened and the woman re-emerged asking who it was who had talked to her supervisor. I wasn’t sure where this question was going, but I fessed up. She then asked for our passports and booking numbers as well as for the Argentinian woman (I’ll call her Mariana, as that is her name), who we’d managed to adopt as a co traveller now. My daughter said “Oh my god, dad, you’re a Karen”. Dictionary dot com says “Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors.” That feels a bit harsh. Especially since it seemed my Karenish actions may well have got us on the boat. (I later clarified and it turns out she meant that I was someone who spoke to the manager. I suppose other bits fit too, though)

The woman went back inside. We waited. After what seemed like ages (but was probably about 15 minutes) during which time our hopes had inflated like, well, a child’s balloon on the birthday itself , only to slowly shrink and deflate to those little sad fist-sized balloons still just about hanging on to a kind of state of balloonness three weeks later, a bus appeared. With a driver. The woman came back out of her hiding place to return our passports and hand us boarding passes…and we were on! The bus, anyway.

I didn’t check what time it was that we got on the bus, so exciting was this development. It seemed like we were going to make it. But then we got stuck in a non moving queue behind a Tesla, the driver and passengers of which had got stuck in passport control. Perhaps for owning a Tesla. Finally things moved, we quickly went through the walking passport control shed and to the constant questions coming through the driver’s radio of “where are those 6 foot passengers? We’re still waiting for the 6 late foot passengers”, we got to the ramp and walked onto the boat at approximately 3.58pm,punching the air in celebration. It felt like a huge victory. Mariana bought us a drink to thank us and to celebrate.

I’d like to say that this was the culmination of our travel annoyances and stress on Day 19, but I cannot. But I will save part 2 (a shorter part, you will be relieved to note) for another post.

No trains today. It was a strike day on the trains in the UK. To some extent I follow the news from the UK so this wasn’t a surprise to me (and to some extent parts of our trip were planned with this in mind. I’m not sure how much this kind of thing would be easy to find information on for someone who wasn’t aware of the current industrial action.)

Instead my brother and his family came down to visit and we had an excellent day picnicking, chatting, playing cricket, and laughing.

I did discover an old falling apart copy of the Thomas Cook European train map and started using it to think about the next leg of the trip

This map also proved to illustrate the route my brother took when he did interrail as a student about 30 years ago. It was, as you will see, a hardcore route, managing to take in Norway and Greece as well as many points in between. I also heard for the first time some new interrail tales, such as the time they were chased around Brindisi by youths on scooters.

Sadly, as ever, there isn’t really the chance to take too much time off interrailing because you have to be thinking about your next move. Like a physical but fairly stupid chess player. Or something. Once again we are stymied by the lack of spaces on trains across the Channel, and we have to get over the water by boat, which again is hard work. Though the hardest bit is getting through England to actually get to the sea – dealing with strikes and bizarre delays…

To which end, the next post I put on this blog threatens to be very long indeed, as I write this from the middle of the travelpocalypse that represents Day 19…

“I have no idea if the 17.57 train is going to be leaving from Cambridge today. I’ve tried calling the train company but they’re not picking up” – Station announcement

We’ve travelled across half of Europe. According to the stats page of the app we’ve been in 11 countries so far and travelled about 4000 kms. We’ve had very full trains and trains that were a bit late. But we’ve not before encountered a train that apparently vanished off the face of the earth.

The train day started off badly when we got to the village station to discover that the train we intended to catch had been cancelled. The announcement told us that this was due to “a number of issues”. I guess it’s nice to know that there were multiple reasons, but “a number of issues” seems like a bit of a cop out. And zero is, after all, a number.

We did eventually get a train (the next one after this was cancelled too – no doubt thanks to some issues) and spent the afternoon in Cambridge, its beautiful views somewhat spoiled by the dry parched nature of the grass

We did stuff, as you do, and eventually headed back to the station to go back, the mere 10ish kms, home. The next train back was due at 17.57, but it was quickly apparent that there were still issues. Probably a number of them. Most trains were delayed. There were also messages on the screens warning of potentially slippery platforms because of the weather. This seemed somewhat odd as the endless drought affecting the country (and in fact most of the continent) was still ongoing. At least in Cambridgeshire, though we learned later that elsewhere in the country there were storms and flooding.

Our train, however, was still showing on time though not actually showing up in a more tangible and useful sense. As 17.57 ticked round, the automated announcement announced “The train now boarding at platform 2 is the 17.57 service to London Kings Cross calling at…”. I waited to see if anyone would start us off and attempt to board this invisible train. But no one did. (Just after that, the standard see it, say it, sorted message came on, which begins “If you see anything unusual…”. I confess I was tempted to report this very unusual ghost train, but I held back)

The next train we could catch left half an hour later, but that one was already showing as delayed. It looked like we might be spending a long time at the station. I texted my daughter to suggest that she perhaps might be advised to shoot for the second last train home in the evening, rather than the last one, since things here were obviously not entirely normal or reliable (well they weren’t reliable, and I’m not sure how normal that is)

In the end, for about 20 kms of rail travel, lasting about 18 minutes in total, we had to wait around for slightly over 2 hours. This seems a lot. I blame the Tories (and I strongly suspect that I am right to do so)

I read the newspaper today, the day after, and there is no mention of the missing passengers. It’s obviously in the interests of the powers that be, that their vanishing remain hushed up.

Most of us didn’t do anything interraily today so I took the day off blogging. Instead here is a picture of a cricket match in the next village. I’ve never seen everything so parched and dry round here before. This is supposed to be the village green (and usually it is actually green)

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.