Every so often something is triggered inside me. It might be something I see on the TV, it might be a build-up of pressures and stresses in my life, it could even be Google Photos showing me an ‘on this day’ memory from yesteryear. It is probably a collection of them all, but it gnaws at me like a little hamster chewing on his little metal prison bars.
That trigger is the urge to drive over to Europe and have a bit drive around.
I am very fortunate that Titchy is very forgiving and that my daughter gets as excited as me when the idea of doing something silly is proposed. She decided to join me on my jaunt and a long weekend was planned. Boy child decided that he couldn’t let his workmates down and take time off, so he stayed at home….nothing at all to do with the European cup final scheduled for the Sunday we were away then?
Our window for planning this trip was just a week and the travel time available was just the Friday to the Monday night, squeezed in between both of our work and ‘other-life’ commitments. We looked at all sorts of combinations of ferries, tunnels and dingy from all sorts of locations up and down the country.
In the end, we settled on the overnight ferry from North Shields to Amsterdam (actually it’s Ijmuiden) which came in at £400 but, if you added a return leg it jumped up to £1,200. So, instead, we decided to get the Calais to Dover ferry on the Monday and drive home, all of that for just £103 and that included the £20 upgrade to first class which was my daughter’s treat…..more of that later! Add in a couple of discount hotels and a tank or two of petrol and out little jaunt was going to set us back £800 all in.
We pulled into the ferry terminal at North Shields with an excited buzz, late on the Friday afternoon and got that excited feeling in the pit of the stomach where you get to drive down a road that you would only get to drive on when you are going on your holidays!
Boarding was incredibly easy, the only issue being that the ticket booth guy told us that there was no longer, post covid, a shop and café at the terminal. Our plan to buy the required “UK” car sticker and light reflectors was scuppered and we ran the risk of being on the run around Europe as a result.
We drove pretty much instantly onto the boat and parked up in the guts of the ferry, with a large separating wall being pulled closed behind the car as we parked up. It was so close to the back of the car that we couldn’t open the boot and so we had to pull out our overnight bags through the back doors of the car using phone torches to find our way around. A frisson of excitement we would have been happy to have skipped to be honest.
We made our way through the boat and, after some confusion, made our way to the prison cell that would be our home for the next 12 hours. We were right at the back of the boat, adjacent to the double doors through which the staff made their way into the ‘public’ area of the boat. Not the quietest nor the best.
We made our way on deck and watched as the ferry made its way out of the dock, out of the Tyne and into the North Sea. Our eyes were whipped into tears with a salty wind hitting our faces, making it hard to discern the coastline behind us disappearing from sight. The difference between the river and the open sea in terms of the pummelling that the boat received was noted, and that was on a very calm day all things considered.
We made our way to the coffee shop, which was a new addition to the boat since our last journey, and settled down with a coffee and croissant. Daughter child had a little wander over to the games section to see if there was anything there for us to do other than jigsaws and came back to the table with Battleships. We pitted our wits against each other for the best part of an hour before we decided to call an end to hostilities with scores tied.
As we played, we were distracted by a group of four lads that were making their way into the fancy dining area, two of which seemed to be impacted by the pitching of the boat significantly more than anyone else on board. Only two hours into the journey, their level of drunkenness was actually pretty impressive.
One lad in particular was picked out for a conversation by the two burly security guards. We picked out the rather surprising sentence of advice to him “There are children and families on board, you CANNOT be naked on the boat anywhere other than the privacy of your own cabin”. It felt like pretty secure advice to be honest.
We followed up our game of Battleships with some hard core Connect Four battles with daughter child taking the win. I stand by the argument that I let her win as I am the bigger person. I am not still hurting over the defeat. Honest.
We put the box back in the games unit and noticed that we could have played either Kerplunk or Jenga as other options. I am not sure that there could be many worse games to play at sea to be honest.
We had a little poke around the duty free shop and, by then, it was about 7:30pm. We made our way back to the cabin and, I am ashamed to say, we had a little snooze. We then had a little word with ourselves and headed back to the bar. By this point it was jumping and we got ourselves a drink, made ourselves comfortable and had a good old people watch.
There was a strange mix of middle aged European families and gangs of young lads that were on their way to Berlin for the football, wrapped in their best Stone Island gear and football flags, dancing away to the live band.
The dancing always seemed to start with one of the European dads. I know they say that you should dance like no one is watching, but these guys knew we were so had no excuse! They looked like the top table of Microsoft dancing on stage at their new product launch. The football lads, all with nothing but a smile and the best of intentions, would then join them to fill the dancefloor and only slightly mock their movements. It was all in the very best of spirits and left us with nothing but smiles on our faces.
Daughter child bought us a round of frozen mango drinks and we finished the night with a Jaeger bomb. Not great at the best of times but with a long drive and an ‘up and down on the waves’ night ahead of us, maybe not the smartest of moves. With floating heads and not much room to move about, we tucked ourselves in and got off to sleep. Next stop, Europe!
Itchy Feet and Titchy Feet 