'Allo 'Allo

Last Saturday, on a not so fine day, 13 ladies from Sutton Salvation Army took the plunge, jumped in 3 cars, and ventured into the great unknown which is the Eurotunnel. Yes, it was the Sutton SA Ladies Day Trip to France... And what a day it was! Ridiculously early start (due to the proximity (or lack thereof) of Sutton to Folkestone) - we met at the Hall at 7.45am with the intention of setting off at 8.00am. And we very nearly did it too, except me being the natural born teacher I am, at the last minute announced, "Now we all have our passports, don't we?" to discover that 2 of our number did not. Fortunately they live very close to the Hall, so it was a quick dash home and then off we went. We made good time down to Folkestone too, just under an hour and a half, and we raced into the terminal for a quick cuppa. It was at this point that one of the ladies (of the forgotten passport fame) discovered that her passport had expired some 11 months earlier! Oh no... Fortunately we had a chat with the Eurotunnel people, and apparently this is a common occurence. They thought that the customs people either wouldn't notice the date in her passport, or wouldn't care about it - so we crossed our fingers and decided to go for it. Some security hey, she made it. And actually the only car that had any sort of delay with passports, well, was mine - with the only non EU passport (that would be mine too). I encountered a bit of questioning by the Pommy customs dude upon re-entry to the UK. Anyway, I digress. We got our train to Calais, but unfortunately got split up, and were all in 3 separate carriages (although Ira and I were in adjacent ones, but Vanessa was in the same carriage as us but on the underneath level). I thought this would pose problems upon exit at Calais, but amazingly, Vanessa came out of the train and pretty much the exact time we did, so we travelled in convoy to Wissant for a spot of lunch. Now I was only in Wissant a few weeks ago, but the change was amazing. There's been a lot of rain by the channel, and the beach in Wissant was practically non-existent, with the tide being right in (and quite ferocious, at that). It was extremely windy there too, so we didn't dally there long, but made our way into town for a spot of lunch. Yum! After lunch it was time to head back to Cite Europe to accomplish our main objective of the day - SHOPPING!!! Oh boy, did some of us shop, too! Me, I was a bit careful about my spending, and really only bought presents for people or a spot of cheese for me (oh and some more sephora, I mean, hey, a girl can never have too much - AND it was 20% off too!). We arranged to meet at the food court for a crepe and a coffee before getting the train back to the UK - but as we were waiting for our food, we suddenly became aware of a loud, incessant beeping noise, followed by an announcement in French. Looking around us, none of the other diners seemed too perturbed by this - nor the waiters for that matter - and so we asked one of the waiters what was going on. "Oh, it is as you say, a fire alarm. Ze are evacuating people." What? So we made our way to our cars - only to realise that we were all parked in different locations, and there was the hugest of queues exiting the car park - and our train was leaving in 20 minutes! Suffice to say that we missed our train, and in fact, 2 of us made it onto the same train, and Ira ended up on the train behind us. We waited for her in Folkestone before we all journeyed in convoy back to Sutton. What a day, hey?