Thursday was a very, very long day for us. We got up at four, left at five with eight alpacas on board for Calais. All went well, sunny weather, calm sea, the boat rather crowded but fine. Dropped in to a supermarket to acquire some wine and then, as the trailer was empty and we were no longer freight, headed for the tunnel. Came off the motorway not realising that the queue we had joined was four hours long and there was no way out. It was dull. Eventually the tunnel staff, probably after being screamed at by the French police as there was traffic backing up everywhere, opened a reserve car park perhaps clocking that all those families with fed up children, needed a loo, needed to get out of the car and probably needed a drink. After an hour or so we were sent off to the ticket booth where a deeply apologetic girl offered us a ticket to the boat or to wait for the next train. As we had already spent five hours there, we decided to stay put and watched a family of rabbits happily munching the grass next to the car. Good thing I didn’t have a gun with me or they would have been stew.
Not much information was forthcoming, we discovered later from the BBC news that not only was there a technical fault in one tunnel, a train had broken down in the other. We wandered aimlessly about the terminal, fed up with drinking tea, when we were called, drove on to the train…and waited, yet another hour. Chas went to sleep in the hope that he might be able to complete the drive home, I tried to sleep but failed as spending even longer in a tunnel is not my idea of fun. So we eventually arrived at Vulscombe Farm at two in the morning, way past our bedtimes!
We were somewhat zombie-like on Friday, unable to think, so did some serious log shed filling, me on the electric sawbench, Chas on his shiny new log splitter. Some of the logs groan as they split.