Page 10

An Adventure to Remember from Iain Wiseman (2nd part)

The initial daylight hours were great with lots of singing and joking on the bus but being on toll roads there were specific times between service station stops which gauged how much you could drink on the bus more so with the fact that there were no flushing toilets.

The service stations were fine but when they were visited by 1,200 UK citizens at the one time, the toilets were overcrowded and the ladies involved decided to use the gents’ cubicles for obvious reasons and when leaving the cubicle the French ladies would utter looking towards the urinals “Cest La Vie”.

However as darkness came upon us the children and babies on the bus became restless and there is nothing worse than nappies being changed in front of you and children crying at the rear wanting to go home. However we struggled through and near to Lyon we stopped at a French service station and one of the chaps with us, Sandy, filled a tray with lager and wine only to be told at the checkout at you were only allocated 1 bottle of beer if you had a full meal. The self service trays were quickly adjusted to suit and kept us going to Calais. 18 hours after having left Barcelona we arrived at Calais where we were to be met by 53 British buses at a car park beside a hotel which was to be opened for us for morning coffee. Thomson unfortunately did not contact the hotel who decided to lock their doors and phone the police. Two van loads of Gendarmes arrived and ushered us all into the car park beyond having been dumped in Calais by the Spanish drivers who for obvious reasons wanted to return to Barcelona as quickly as possible.

The 11 buses that were at the car park were the first buses who left before midnight the day before and one of the drivers told us that the ferry company were only allowing 4 or 5 buses at a time so you could imagine myself and George’s thoughts at the time i.e. lets get on one of the buses quickly and get on our way to the UK. I decided to shout at who was going to Glasgow and Scotland and suggested that the bus I was standing beside was our bus and very quickly this was filled with Scots and the driver dually left the car park on his way to the ferry port. We arrived at the bus parking bays and our bus was the first bus to leave Calais at 10 o’clock on the morning on the 20th (we have now been travelling for almost 38 hours in total with hardly any sleep).

On board the ferry the first thing we needed was a settler and a couple of sandwiches which kept us going to Dover but on the way there we were told by the driver that he was only taking us to Gatwick Airport where we were being dumped again to be picked up by another bus which would take us to a service station 10 miles from Gatwick where further buses would be allocated to those going to all parts of the country. (Contd next Page)