veryoldbear

Anyway, back to UK tomorrow from Caen on the NEX subbing for the MSM. I hope it's reasonably calm. Then I must get myself an International Driving License (or something) .....

They still are, but when went over this week both the Carteret and Granville boats arrived at the same time. It was like Sunday evening at Stansted airport i.e. chaos. The toilet signs send you outside and round the corner to dodgy bogs 60 m down the road away from town. However top marks for the refreshment stall outside who were cheerful and welcoming. For lunch we went to The Quayside. Excellent but a bit pricey. Rather a lot of banksters and their molls taking lunch. Hilarious. I hadn't got my shiny suit with me, and Mrs OAB should really have had the blonde hair-do and come in in her little black dress but WTH archie ...

Sure, one finds out eventually. But there should be a tourist office with maps and information in the ferry terminal. There isn't even a toilet.

Yes, I jest a little about the MI terminal, but the huge amount of reclamation work at St Helier means that it's quite a hike to find the old town. No signs, no tourist office, nothing. Just a lot of day trippers stuck in a commercial wasteland wondering why they came. All very odd.

We did a day-trip Carteret to St Helier yesterday on the Granville and she was running nicely. On the way out it wasa bit choppy and she had to slow down, but she was fine on the way back. The Manch-Isles ferry terminal at St Helier is a dump and a good walk through Canary Wharf to try and find St Helier ... but we did find it eventually

MSM has got some fishing nets round a propeller and going off next week to drydock to get untangled. Our voyage 1630 Friday 14 had been pulled and we have a space on a special NEX run Caen to Portsmouth. Now praying for good weather ....

Dunkerque ferry port is out in the middle of nowhere. I wouldn't want to camp out there in the vain hope of hopping on an HGV. Ouistreham is far more congenial.

We are regulars on the Portsmouth - Caen route on the Normandie and the MSM, and the cabin cleaning lark seems to be getting worse. As I understood, the kicking you out of the cabin 30 minutes before arrival was to allow cleaning for the return journey. But now the cabin cleaning seems to be done by shore-side subcontractors who don't seem to come onboard until loading starts. They are then faffing about for another 30 minutes or so, leaving passengers stranded grumbling in alleyways or sitting on their bags. BF seem to want their cake and eat it: either let us have cabins until arrival or get cabins ready for oncoming passengers. Grumble grumble.

One of the problems at Portsmouth seems to be that inbound traffic has to cross over the outbound, and the marshalls are continually having to stop and start traffic. Frankly it's a mess and they need to do something about it. But it'll only be worse after Brexit, when we'll get stuck in the immigration queue for the same time as the crossing.

Do what?

Over to Ouistreham on the Monday afternoon MSM with six coachloads of American students. That's an awful lot of PAX. But a) they were incredibly well-behaved and b) BF actually set up a two-line system in the self-service restaurant and had set times for each group to come through. It all worked remarkably well.

We've been in and out of Ouistreham several times this year. The chaps generally seem to hang about up the road by the supermarket. If more than a few come down to the square the gendarmes send them back up the road. The chaps have no interest in private motorists in cars, they are more interested in trying to get into lorries which is a pretty futile exercise.

I've had exactly the same problem. The plastic ones always seemed to crack.

Portion control has set in.

Look on the bright side: very few icebergs on the St Malo run.