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Published: October 12th 2009
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Thursday - Back to Bois-en-Ardres
Thursday - The Green Room
It’s time to move on. I have to be back home for a family wedding on Saturday. So it’s “thank you”s and “goodbye”s to Nick and Anne who have put me up and put up with me and showed me around the local area for the last week. I load up the car and head for Calais. Fortunately this time Ken and my Satnav don’t want me to go through the middle of Paris and I have a fairly uneventful journey back to Bois-en-Ardres. The roads are almost empty. But the roads are expensive. It costs me about €40 in tolls for a journey of about 350 miles. On the next day I drove from Dover to Mansfield, a journey of just over 200 miles - there’s no toll to use the road but it will take me 7 hours because of the volume of traffic.
I arrive at
Les Fuchsias in the late afternoon and Francis, who tells me that he’s never piloted a hovercraft in his life, puts me in the Green Room. I decide that Francis is far too sophisticated and cultured to understand any
In The Green Room
It's just green!! Jerry Springer jokes and follow him to the Green Room.
I love the Green Room!! It’s right at the top of the house and it’s
GREEN. It’s all the reasons for not stopping at a Travel Lodge.
I go back to the same café I was in 8 days ago in search of food. I’m more confident in my ability to communicate in something a little bit more like French now. My confidence is immediately shaken when I order a beer and the barman asks me if I want it “Gallois” or Belgian -
I think that’s what he said!! It’s back to sign language for me to work out that he’s asking me if I want draft or bottled beer. Like all the other bars everyone is very social here; everyone greets me and shakes my hand when they come into the bar.
There is football on TV.
Lille, which is fairly local, are playing
Valencia. I watch the match and make the right sort of disapproving noises when a French player gets elbowed in the face. The barman assumes that I must be a Manchester United supporter. No, Mr Barman, not Man U; and your next three guesses are all wrong too! Amazingly, he’s never heard of
Stoke City! I try to explain to him that there are more than 4 football teams in England. “Ils sont dans le Premier League, mate!” He loads up a football game on his Playstation, tries to find Stoke City as a team to play and looks disappointed that he can’t find them. He continues to play the game and decides he is going to be Wayne Rooney. I decide it’s time to leave.
Friday - Home
It's an early(ish) start to get the 10 a.m. ferry from
Calais to
Dover. It's a very quiet crossing with not many passengers. There
is quite a big party of French schoolkids on board and I’m beginning to think that the invention of the digital camera was not such a good idea {
but I’m being a hypocrite here!}. I remember the good old days when all the kids had a walkman!
I spend the rest of the day driving home from Dover to Mansfield. And it does take all day! I average about 30mph on the British motorways on a Friday. Welcome home!!
And finally….
It's that Jerry Springer bit again…..It’s been a definite advantage stopping with friends, and I am grateful to Nick and Anne. I think I got to see so much more than I would have done if I was finding my own way round or on an organised tour. Anne’s superior knowledge of French enabled us to join in more in places like Ali’s Bar {compared with my efforts in the café at Bois-en-Ardres} and Nick knows the sort of places I will want to see and is able to keep feeding me those snippets of information he has already found out.
Do they have any regrets about coming here? None at all! Anne loves speaking French. I think if I were in a similar situation I would have days when I would just want to retreat from having to permanently concentrate on the language and have a “veg out” day using just English. Nick finds the lifestyle healthier despite the amount of wine he has to sample.
Something we talked about quite a lot is other people’s attitudes to us. Like me, Nick and Anne get annoyed with people who tell them how lucky they are to be doing what they are doing. We all felt that it’s more about making choices than being “lucky”. Nick and Anne quit their jobs in the UK in the hope of being able to find enough work to survive in France. To make it work they have had to live quite modestly and Anne has had to physically demanding work for a minimum wage.
The only slight regret I have is that I wasn’t able to have a go at working the
Vendangemyself, although I’m sure the doctors who regularly inspect the Manky Foot will be pleased about that!
Next stop
Ethiopia.
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Nick James
non-member comment
Wot no hovercraft?
I'm still reeling from the shock revelation about Francis's lack of hovercraft expertise. An illusion shattered. I've forgotten why I thought he was an ex-hovercraft pilot, but there must have been some reason. Any idea what he did do?