{"id":640,"date":"2015-07-24T23:15:54","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T22:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/?p=640"},"modified":"2015-07-25T22:28:51","modified_gmt":"2015-07-25T21:28:51","slug":"friday-cutting-it-fine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/friday-cutting-it-fine\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday – Cutting it Fine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following notification of the Marco Polo’s two hour delay, my departure time from home was duly put back by a couple of hours, and I enjoyed a leisurely morning before setting off for Tilbury from North Yorkshire.<\/p>\n

What started out as a well-paced, rather idyllic day, soon turned into something very different, however.<\/p>\n

Only an hour before leaving, I noticed there was a problem with my website. Not the sort of thing one wants to spot when you know you’re going to be away, working on a ship with flakey wi-fi for the next month or so. Raising a support ticket with my website hosting company has resulted in the problem being looked at, but it may take a day or two before it is fully resolved (basically, the SSL Certificate is in the process of being renewed, which happens annually… but there appears to have been a minor glitch). It’s nothing serious, but some browers are flagging up error messages, and warnings of an expired certificate; something I could well do without right now.<\/p>\n

With my mood having been set to very dark grey on the grumpy meter, I finallly finished loading the van up and set off.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t really thought this through, had I? The Marco Polo wouldn’t get into Tilbury until 4pm, wouldn’t finish disembarking passengers from the previous cruise until 6pm and planned to sail at 9pm, so I figured Ieaving at 1pm would give me plenty of time (the journey normally takes me about four to four and a half hours). What I hadn’t considered was the fact that this was a Friday afternoon; not only that, it is traditionally one of the busiest Friday afternoons of the year (apparently).<\/p>\n

The journey was horrendous. The A1 was stop-start the whole way, with accidents, incidents, bottlenecks and moments where it would inexplicably grind to a halt, presumably due to nothing more than volume of traffic. As the North became the South, the weather also deteriorated rather dramatically; by the time I’d reached Cambridge, the skies were thunderously dark and the rain torrential, making visibility poor due to the large amounts of spray from the road.<\/p>\n

\"2015-07-24_A1_Traffic\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I spent the whole journey going from slim hope, every time the flow of traffic picked up a little, to despair, when it slowed to a crawl. Glancing at the AA app on my phone wasn’t much help, as it stubbornly refused to update its information, and the dot-matrix signs just kept giving me bad news after bad news (queue ahead – caution; Accident – Slow Down; Incident – Slow Down; Road Closed after A-blurdy-blurdy-blurdy….) – I hate those signs!<\/p>\n

I’d promised myself a stop at services somewhere along the way, but it simply wasn’t going to happen. Time was getting on, and if things didn’t improve soon, I was going to miss the boat. Bladder Department was sending urgent emails to Brain Department, but they were being dismissed in the balance of importance…<\/p>\n

4pm passed, and I knew that the Marco Polo would just be arriving at the port. 6pm passed and I knew that embarkation would have just started. Check-in would finish at around 8pm. I was making very slow, frustrating progress, and was beginning to truly believe that I would be turning round and heading home in defeat.<\/p>\n

Then, just as I thought things couldn’t get any worse…<\/p>\n

… they got worse…<\/p>\n

Things were starting to pick up. I’d somehow managed to get past the two traffic accidents that had happened on the M11, and was on the curved road leading on to the M25, when it all sort of ground judderingly to a halt again. If I’d been 10 minutes earlier I would have missed it. If I’d been 5 minutes earlier I might have been one of the 4 cars scrunched-up and strewn across the carriageway. This fresh accident happened just to spite me… I was only 20 minutes away from Tilbury and the traffic queue was so resolutely not moving that people were getting out of their cars and walking forward to see what was occurring… yes, it was that bad…<\/p>\n

I finally succumbed and dashed into some convenient, nearby trees to answer the call of nature, then sat there wondering what to do next. After calling home, I tried calling both the contact numbers printed on my CMV paperwork, both of which were answered by machines informing me of when their office hours are. I then tried googling ‘Tilbury Cruise Terminal’ on my phone. Of the two numbers that I managed to find, one gave me an answer machine, the other was actually answered by a human being. He explained that I wasn’t speaking to the right department., but happily gave me a number that he thought mmight help me. Unfortunately, that one simply rang and rang, and eventually I gave up.<\/p>\n

Finally; I fished out my laptop from its bag and booted it up. I remembered I had an emergency number for the Marco Polo somewhere…<\/p>\n

At last; I managed to get through to the Marco Polo itself. The person I spoke to was very upbeat; told me not to worry (even though I didn’t know how many hours I could be stuck here), and assured me that they wouldn’t leave without me (yes they would, I thought….).<\/p>\n

The good news is; the hold-up only lasted about 30 minutes. Because I was so close to the impact site, as soon as they had a lane free, traffic started moving, and it wasn’t long before I was on my merry way. Had I been 10 minutes later, I would have been further down the queue, and probably still be inching forward… such is the nature of time.<\/p>\n

I poled up to the Cruise Terminal at about 8pm – 7 hours after leaving home. It was raining and very quiet, as the coaches had all been and gone, and all the passengers were inside the terminal being processed for embarkation. A man came out to take my bags and I went to park the van, and take my stuff into the building. A member of the CMV staff streamlined me through security, and to the gangway; in less than 15 minutes, I was on board the Marco Polo.<\/p>\n

Piece of cake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following notification of the Marco Polo’s two hour delay, my departure time from home was duly put back by a couple of hours, and I enjoyed a leisurely morning before setting off for Tilbury from North Yorkshire. What started out as a well-paced, rather idyllic day, soon turned into something very different, however. Only an hour before leaving, I noticed...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":647,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions\/647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}