AN EVENTFUL TRIP

I usually start off my cruise blogs with a declaration something along the lines of ‘the journey down from Yorkshire was pleasingly uneventful’.

This is not something that could be said of our trip down to Dover.

I say ‘Dover’; actually, the plan was to travel down on Tuesday, to stay in a Premier Inn near Maidstone overnight, so that we would be in the area, requiring only a relatively short drive to join the ship at Dover Cruise Terminal on Wednesday. This takes all the pressure off the journey from home which, on this occasion took no less than seven hours, and the events that unfolded along the way more than justified that plan…

There were two notable events of which I speak. Of the two, the first was the mosty spectacular, and is the one that both Tracey and I are still talking about, and trying to process three days later…

Picture this…

We were on the M1 southbound, approaching London. The traffic was heavy but moving, with vehicles in all three lanes, all behaving themselves… except for one large HGV truck ahead of us (at that point, we were in the centre lane).

The truck in question was acting very erratically. At first, it just looked like it was doing the frequent lane-swapping thing that is all-too common in such situations. But it became clear after a while that he seemed to be lane swapping with some purpose in mind. He would signal and move to the inside lane for a bit, pushing forward closely to the car in front before signalling and moving back into the middle lane again. Each time, one presumes, he was inching forward a little more. What brought the truck to our attention was his behaviour between these manouvres, whereby he would be swinging from left to right rather aggressively, within his lane, and there was also the long and loud, drawn out, sound of his horn, which made him sound very angry. From where we were, we couldn’t quite tell who it was that he might be angry with, although from the way he was tailinging a small black car in front of him, we rather thought that this was the subject of his ire.

With all this lane-switching, swinging about, tailgating and angry horn blasting, we decided it might be an idea to pass at the earliest opportunity and put him behind us. As the traffic opened up, I saw my chance and began to overtake. What happened next happened quickly, and remains the recurring subject of our continued post-analysis. As we drew alongside him, he swung out to the right, forcing me to swerve quickly away from him, to avoid him catching our car. As I completed our overtaking, and was clear of him, we glanced to our left, and saw a taxi on the inside, cross over to the middle lane and right into the path of the angry truck. As we drove away (we couldn’t stop because there were other vehicles right behind us), we could see the devastation in the wing mirrors as the truck ploughed into the taxi and came to a gradual halt, bringing the whole of the M1 behind us to a halt with it.

As I say; we’re still processing it and one can’t help but keep going over the ‘what-ifs’ of the situation…

Some time later, our second event happened once we’d joined the M25, travelling in an anti-clockwise direction (West, then), to get to Kent, south of the Thames, avoiding the Dartford Tunnel toll.

This event was less dramatic. Some accident or incident ahead of us, highlighted by an ambulance and police car which had to fight their way through three lanes of slow-moving vehicles, brought the whole flow of traffic to a grinding halt. We don’t know precisely what the problem was, only that it held us up for about half an hour; a half hour where you know it is serious because everyone was getting out of their cars to stretch their legs and ponder over when it might all start moving again.

The good news is that after that, there were no further hold-ups, and we arrived at the Premier Inn near Maidstone roughly 7 hours after leaving home. The two hold ups were enough to remind us why it is that I always book a hotel in the vicinity of the cruise port a day in advance of embarkation… exactly for this reason. Essentially, it takes all the pressure off (imagine how stressed we would have been if it had been embarkation day and that we knew we would have to be at the port in time to join a ship that would certainly not wait for us if we were late).

Dinner came from a chinese takeaway just down the road from the hotel; tomorrow, we will be driving to Dover to join the Spirit of Adventure… what could possibly go wrong?…