This morning we had our final breakfast at the very nice B&B we'd been staying in in Belgium, and drove back into Turnhout to grab some petrol before heading out onto the motorways for the 2 hour (ish) drive to Dunkirk for the ferry home.
RJ started the drive for the first hour and a half, and I took the next hour. He managed to successfully navigate the traffic hell that is the Antwerp ring road (despite me shouting at him for going in the wrong lane once) - a bit of a baptism of fire as even on a Saturday morning it was very busy and the road signage doesn't always seem to match the lanes or the sat nav!
My section of the drive was much less troublesome, though we had a minor detour when some roadworks saw all motorway traffic directed off at a junction to make a U-turn at a roundabout and get back on again. Imagine that happening on the M25!
As we approached Dunkirk we saw more signs of the heightened security in the port area. Aires near the ports were barriered off, abandoned and graffiti'd, and hastily-erected No Stopping signs were put up along the port access roads. The high fences with razor wire tops didn't make it feel any more welcoming. Once we'd checked in for our ferry, not only did we have the usual passport checks, but every vehicle was stopped and its cargo inspected - in our case they had a look in the boot and a rummage around the cases on the back seat to satisfy themselves we had nobody trying to hide in there!
After that it was the usual ferry process - queuing in our lane until really quite soon before sailing time, then parking up on the ship and the usual trip around the self service restaurant. We managed to bag ourselves a nice little table by the windows that overlooked the bow of the ship, so we could see where we were going throughout. RJ finally managed to get himself the curry he'd been dying for for days, though apparently it wasn't great. I had the fish and chips mostly because I remembered the fish being quite decent. Thankfully my pudding was actually warm this time round.
The crossing from Dunkirk being longer, I'd brought my laptop onboard, so while RJ read I first tried to take advantage of the free wifi, but finding it unusably slow gave up and instead used these blog posts to try to calculate how many rides we'd done in each park. From my mental arithmetic, I reckon we managed to take 200 rides over the two weeks, which is an average of 20 per park. Not bad at all.
In case anyone cares, in order of number of rides (including shows) done in that park, our scoreboard goes like this:
1. 34 rides at Heide Park (1.5 days)
2. 31 rides at Efteling (1.5 days)
3=. 25 rides at Europa Park
3=. 25 rides at Bobbejaanland
5. 24 rides at Hansa Park
6. 20 rides at Phantasialand
7. 12 rides at Movie Park
8. 11 rides at Parc Asterix
9=. 9 rides at Disney Studios (1/2 day)
9=. 9 rides at Disneyland Park (1/2 day)
Second week parks score highly as it was much quieter, so we spent less time in queues and more time riding. Asterix was our busiest park and the one with the longest queues so unsurprisingly it's at the bottom (the Disney parks being only half a day visit each). This also says nothing about the quality...
On reaching Dover we headed back to London. Traffic crossing the Thames looked pretty awful no matter which way we went - there was an accident at the Dartford Crossing causing tailbacks on the M25 to the M20 junction, and the Blackwall Tunnel was its usual congested self. We went via the latter, and spent a good half hour or so shuffling forward a few metres every minute or two, which wasn't a huge amount of fun. Once on the other side, traffic was better, so we were able to pop up the A12 to deliver RJ to Essex, then back down again for me to unload and park my poor belagured Fiesta up, nearly 2000 miles after we began.
Tomorrow morning I have no alarm set, and my washing machine is working overtime to clear the backlog of laundry I've accumulated over the trip. I also have a ton of photos to upload, so it's going to be a busy one! Almost wishing I'd booked Monday as an extra day off!
Look out for a few bonus posts over the next few days (if I have time to write them) giving a bigger overview of the trip!
No comments:
Post a Comment