Bon Voyage - or not as the case may be!

Well, here we are, sat in the terminal for the Euro Tunnel, waiting. And waiting. And waiting. It's an odd place to be sat, to spend the Friday evening before Christmas, but here we are, waiting patiently - or not so patiently - for our train to whisk us away under the sea (this is, by the way, the only place you should sing the Bobby Darin classic with slightly altered words; altogether now 'somewhere, below the sea...' ) Now, normally we're pretty good at arriving in time to drive straight to loading and then on to the train and this evening was, we thought, no exception. We made out way down the M11 and round the M25 without any hold ups. We negotiated the M25/M20 roadworks with success and merrily drove down the M20 to the tunnel checkin. And there we came unstuck. We had a ticket, purchased many months ago, we were on time, but the computer - in its best Little Britain voice - said No. On investigation by a nice young lady with a sexy French accent - how do they make the English language sound so damn sexy? They can be 200 kg of hairy muscled gorilla French woman and yet the right words in that accent and I go all weak at the knees. I blame my Aunt - anyway, on investigation it was discovered that my darling better half had, and there's no polite way of saying this, totally fucked up. We had a nicely purchased return ticket that read 'Calais-Folkstone, Folkstone-Calais'. Yep, she'd booked the wrong directions!

Off to the information desk we were sent to discover that every train was full so we'd have to wait several hours and that all trains were running late as well by 90 minutes. Oh joy. Now, here I sit, tapping away at the keyboard, tired, bored and with another 2 hours to go before the train ride and the start of our 3-4 hour drive to Germany. And to top it all off, the car is ever so slightly broken. It's leaking coolant, slowly but surely. The garage had it for 3 days during which time they failed to fix the fault but did eventually trace the problem to the head gasket which they quoted us, wait for it, over a thousand pounds to fix!!! We fell over too.

Suffice to say, we said no thanks and now, against their advice we're driving to Germany for Christmas. The car is booked into a German VW dealer and no doubt it will be fixed quicker and cheaper than in the UK. Plus we'll be wining and dining until we explode which is alot better than staying at home with an empty fridge and a freezer that contains nothing but fruit pies and crumbles. Damn, now I'm hungry again. Perhaps it's time for the traditional English restorative: a cup of tea. Good job the bar's still open even though it's 1am!

Tune in later to see if we made it in time for breakfast or whether we exploded somewhere in Belgium (which would be the most exciting thing to have happened there all year!). Wish us luck!