Saturday July 26th
5.00am and the alarm beeps to wake us to get up and get
ready for our 5.45amish departure. I say ish here regarding our departure time
because it had been the subject of conversation throughout the proceeding days.
It went like this me: “we only need to be there 45 minutes before the boat
sails and sure if we miss it there is another one” yer man: “anything could
happen on the way, you never know”.
There’s no denying that statement.
So you can visualise the scene as we pulled out of the drive
at 5.57am! We decided it would be best if I drove as once we hit the major
traffic jams, that one gets at 6.00am on a Saturday morning, yer man could navigate us around them. The reason for the delay being that the
coffee machine (a Nespresso no less) had broken down the previous day, and so
making coffee was a bit long winded. This
in a home with a premier account with Nespresso which means that if we don’t
order 500 capsules every 4 weeks from them, they call us up.
We have Satnav in case you didn’t know, Nellie is its name
and she was called into action as we left Beckenham, just in case. An upside or
a downside, depending on which side of the car you were sitting in, is that it shows the
estimated arrival time. In our case 7.40! So that would leave us 10 minute
late of the ideal arrival time, but still 35 minutes before the boat actually
left Portsmouth. Not a beep was said,
many a marriage has survived with this strategy.
We reach the M25 in 25 minutes, which did prompt Nellie into
estimating our arrival at 7.34am, so we were heading in the right direction in
more ways than one. On to the top of the A3 and within another 15 minutes we
are whizzing past Guildford nicely. It was a super morning to be on
road, conversation was a tad light though.
As we pulled into the Brittany Ferries port, the tailback
was out the gate, literally. They had more staff then you could shake a fist at
and oh yes we arrived at 7.25am… 5 minutes before the expected time. I said
nought you will be pleased and surprised to learn. However yer man did comment
that the journey was all a little stressful. “Was it?” I said putting on a
slightly surprised tone?
We did however (interesting use of the collective pronoun
here. Ed) manage to manoeuvre ourselves into the slowest checking-in queue, and
when we finally got to checked in, I asked did he have a problem with his
computer? He smiled and said oh no, it is all fine. “Then why? may I ask are
you processing cars at such a slow pace compared to your colleagues…”
Boarded and sailing it was lovely to sit down with the
weekend newspapers and upon reading an article in The Guardian announcing that
10 million children had broken up from school that week, I thought you don’t
need to tell us that, as far as I could see around me, they are all on this
boat.
Thankfully we have the foresight to book ourselves a cabin
and mega zzzzzz where had. It had been quite
while since we took a day time crossing to France and an even longer
time since we did the Portsmouth to Caen route. Our early start led us to go to
the restaurant and have a leisurely breakfast. The late departure, and therefore
late arrival gave us the chance for another visit o the restaurant for a light
lunch – well we are on holiday!
One benefit of arriving on time (hahaha.Ed) at the port in
Portsmouth, i.e. not so early that they bung you and your little car up on the
top deck away from the zillions of 4WD’s and their trailers, roof racks and
bike racks, is that you are more likely to be on a normal level car deck. This
meant we disembarked within minutes of docking and were tootling down the
motorways of France and arrived nicely at Chez Marsilly at 7.53pm – Nellie kept
us informed.
 |
| Fuchia and Vine abound |
We unpacked and tucked into our M&S picnic (brought in
case of an emergency!) and yer man says "I am off out for a walk". I felt it was
best to stay and mind the house but within 3 minutes he is back with the
amazing news that the Bar - Tabac - Presse at the end of our road is not only open at this god
forsaken hour (9.15pm) but has live music. So we trotted down and yes there
they were. We were speechless, well until the wife came and asked us if we’d
like a drink.
I say speechless because this is a business that when we
arrived in Marsilly choose the hours it opened based on, well not on any
obvious plan we could work out. 8am – 10am and maybe 4pm – 6pm if you were
lucky. Every so often a sign would appear on the door “ferme expectionalle”. So to be open on a Saturday night and with
music was surprising but fun. We stayed about ½ hour, the local were playing music and
singing. It was nice in a French sort of way.
Home and an early night after a
long day and I sleep soundly with the realization that I will probably never
arrive bang on time for a ferry crossing again!
Sheila (what is the speed limit around here?) O’Reilly
We were cycling around by the church and approached the Relais de la Poste, our trusty, lunchtime only, local resto. We decided to stop for a breather and a local passed us telling us "Il est ferme" We thought that we could see that for ourselves and shrugged our shoulders. We thought we recognised the local as the patron but thought nothing of it.
Even when I read something in the local newsletter about Le Ancien Relais and a reference to Restaurant Aux Savours De Marsilly did it occur to me that the Relais was gone and replaced by the said ASdM in the same premises and it opened on June 8th. And here's the thing - a close inspection of the opening times shows that, while it is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, for the rest of the week the bar is open from 10.00am to 9.30pm the resto is also open in the evenings 7.00pm to 9.30pm. A new dawn.
