Sailing home

While the trip to France at the beginning of a two week holiday is always a great way to start, the trip back can be a bit of a drag.

One of the guys who pushed the boat off in St Malo

The fact that the ferry takes around nine hours to make the crossing is not much of a problem when you’re in a cabin and travelling over night, fast asleep. The return leg, however, is during the day. Still, the journey is certainly not stressful and the time goes fast enough. Particularly if you have a laptop, a book and a reclining seat.

And the trip has been made even less stressful this time because of the number of fellow travellers on board. There were very few on the outward journey and there were even less for the one home. Perhaps the ones missing didn’t get the message about the earlier sailing. Whatever…it certainly worked for us.

The ferry was almost deserted. At one stage we went for a wander (actually we went for a few wanders not just the one) and walked through the cabaret performance space and spared a little pity for the poor guy singing his heart out to an audience more interested in watching the football, reading or just chatting to each other. That makes it sound as if there was a big inattentive audience. There were about 15 people dotted around the room.

One thing it has pointed out to us (and has pointed out to us previously as well) is how much we would hate a cruise. Apart from being stuck with a whole bunch of strangers we’d not normally be stuck with out of choice, we’d also feel stuck between places. There’s stuff to do on the ferry but we rarely do them because it’s a mode of transport for us rather than a holiday extra. Or maybe I remember the horrors of our trip to Australia back when I was five.

A final farewell to St Malo

Speaking of horrors…our final night in St Malo wasn’t particularly good as I ate something that didn’t fancy moving through my body in the traditional way. Instead it waited until I was asleep and then decided it wanted an emergency evacuation. I sat up suddenly, waking Mirinda in the process, and went to the bathroom where all help was given to facilitate said evacuation.

Subsequent sleep was accordingly fitful, to say the least. It wasn’t the ideal way to spend the last night of our holiday and made me very glad we had a Sunday to get over it in our own bed.

Overall, the holiday was fantastic. Particularly the week in the pigeonnaire. Highlights would have to be Fontevraud Abbey and the Lescaux II cave but really every day was filled with either wonder, joy, idle lazing or a general combination of all three. The perfect holiday, really.

The two bald guys who tied our boat up in Portsmouth