Today we thought we would give the Eurotunnel a go, booked our tickets through tesco clubcard – ready for a weekend driving our own car somewhere in france for a bit of shopping and some time a la foreign.
So I have done more than my fair share of homework on what the requirements are to take your perfectly road legal UK car over to another part of the European Community. So to drive there you need your Car registration, Insurance, A “green card”, your driving licence, an emergency triangle, a yellow reflective jacket (HAS to be in the glove compartment), and to screw around with your headlights to avoid offending the timid French drivers.
I have been driving in America, Germany, Macedonia, Malaysia, and here – so plenty of driving on the other side of the road experience so that was not going to be a problem. We got ready and left at 8am from west London I blasted all the way to folkestone as the tomtom satnav was convinced it would take almost two hours to get there for our “check in before 10am” deadline before we catch our 10:30am train reservation.
It’s 9.20 and suddenly we are there, confronted by “tool booth ahead” signs, I’m wondering what the fuck? not even in France yet. But this is the part where you “check in” with your reservation number and get a large ticket with a letter on it that you hang from your rear view mirror. The machine regrets to announce that it cannot give us our 10:30am train and can only offer us a place on the 10:35am so I wonder what the fuck – who cares it’s 5 minutes. OK so now we are in and it’s time to get some breakfast; while downing our £10 of greasy service station slop we hear an announcement asking people with letter O please go to border control now. As we have letter P we presume it fine to wait a while as it’s not even 10am yet.
We take a walk around to kill 10 minutes and realise no more announcements have been made so off to the car we go through the police bit to confirm that are not crooks, then wave our red passports at another french bloke, only to find there is a single file queue of cars there at 10:20am and it’s going nowhere – there are about 50 cars in the queue and it’s our first time on this thing so we are amazed if they can get everyone on this train within 15 minutes.
In the distance we see cars that have left the start of the queue going backwards.. second “WTF?” moment of the day. So we have been on Eurotunnel property for over an hour now and are absolutely nowhere, the selling point of the Eurotunnel being that you can be in France in around half an hour.
So a pickup truck comes racing along and we think that’s the answer, another 10 mins and we are at the start of the queue and told to go to lane 9 (there are about 12 lanes where you wait.. again..). It’s now 10:55am and we realise this morning is’nt going quite to plan – I have been wanting to take my own car out of the UK just for the fun of it for years now so I’m getting a little disappointed.
Finally shit starts to happen, lanes 1-5 go off one after the other, then 7, then 6… then 8… then 10, 11, 12, 13.. well half way through 13, then the rest go off…..
Lane 9 cars are all still there, and we hear an announcement finally saying that they ” regret to announce for cars with P and Q tags that the 10:35 train is now full and we are being given priority place on the next train at 13:40, so we all get out and go off to the dozy prick standing at the barrier to give him a piece of our mind – he of course hasn’t got two braincells to rub together and asks everyone to go back to their cars and wait for him to give out some vouchers..
As we go back someone else says this guys vouchers are only for a cup of tea… fucking rediculous episode this is turning into. As I get back to our car around 15th in line I realise this asshole is going to take an hour to get to us and as our weekend in France is basically fucked now because our “30 minute trip to france by train” is now a fucking 5 hour trip to France by train and we could have gone to Paris by plane and back by now and spending a quarter of your daytrip travelling is pointless. So I walked back up to him and asked where I could go to get a refund as I didn’t fancy waiting wasting another hour of the weekend. Last week was was hell of a stressful one banging my head on a wall again at work followed by a very informative antenatal class all day friday.
I pull the car out and wait in a separate line to go to the customer services for a refund, we wait there.. so I get out and ask dipshit how much longer we have to wait given we now are not interested in Eurotunnel anymore – by the time I get to him the barrier is up, when I am back in the car (third in line) the barrier is down and we wait AGAIN… seriously who the fuck is running this place?, so I stick the car in reverse and race back to this monkey to tell him to radio it in to be raised again… and we wait…. yes… even more waiting..
Then a nice guy comes and waits to escort us on the other side of the barrier back to customer services, they say they will refund this “back to our card”, so I asked him “what card?”.. he actually looks at the screen to see we paid for Eurostar with Tesco clubcard tokens and that we would get a refund that way…. I ask him for a receipt to tha effect rather than just leaving without documentation, and we go to wait for nice bloke to escort us all off the property… so you leave through the staff exit and head straight down this road.. which turns left… into a roundabout… that takes you all the way back to where you started then spits you out on the motorway…
And that was our weekened in France… thinking about taking Eurotunnel to take your car to the continent?, don’t waste your time with them, try a ferry instead.
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