Day 46: Sunday 27th September
Not a great night’s sleep for either of us what with the nose-blowing and coughing, with traffic noise in the background. The road is busy right into the early hours of Sunday morning.
We have a long day’s driving back through a series of countries – Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, but the kilometres gradually clock up and the return of warm sunny weather compensates for our both feeling so crap.
We get to Calais at around 5.30pm, first investigating where we might stop over – there are a couple of free aires including one on the ferry port itself. However, that looks likely to be noisy with night sailings pulling people out while we’re trying to sleep. (By 2010 the aires are no longer free.)
We first seek out a supermarket – they’re all closed but we do find a boulangerie/ patisserie with a few loaves still on the shelf. The woman is very friendly.
Then back to the search for a resting place. We find an ideal spot but it seems impossible to reach as the road is closed. But we can see motorhomes parked on it! A detour past an asylum seekers’ (‘sans-papiers’) support project brings us back on track. There is a crowd of 150-200 ‘sans-papiers’ outside one building that looks like a nightshelter and an anarchist slogan graffitied on a wall nearby – ‘solidarité avec les sans -papiers’.
We find the way round – grabbing almost the last available of 25-odd pitches right on the edge of the dock – with views over the marina and the sun setting to the side – our luck returns!
We have our final evening meal on board and our last game of Scrabble – which leaves the tournament inconclusive – we will have to have a play-off game when we get home.
After that it’s still early so we wrap up a bit and take a stroll through Calais. There are dozens of restaurants and bars – most of them largely empty.
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