Four of us Red Hat Ladies booked to go to Bruges Christmas market and were more than surprised when they told us the pick up time in Sandwich was 5.25am! We were all there and the coach arrived at 5.45. We arrived at Dover Docks at just after 6. We went to board the ferry and were told to drive to the cruise ferry terminal. A queue of coaches there and they were supposedly using their new system. Total chaos. Eventually we were led into a building with two desks manned by the French Border Force. If you went to one you had fingerprints taken and a photo, the other didn’t bother with the fingerprints! One of the border force even shouted at one of the passengers saying she used the wrong hand! They didn’t have my fingerprints! Back on the coach and back to the other ferry port but they wouldn’t let us through the check in. Passports all taken away and checked again! No one knew what was going on and we missed our ferry to Dunkirk! In total we were at Dover Docks for THREE hours! Then we had to take the ferry to Calais. I hope they will sort this out some time in the near future because no one seemed to know what they were doing.
After that we did have a good day, and had vouchers for breakfast on the ferry.
It was quite a walk from the drop off to the market and the shops were beautiful, obviously the price of their chocolate greatly increased and we thought the market was smaller than expected. We walked around a lot and then decided we would go in one of the horse and carriages but went to the wrong pick up point and then decided we didn’t have time to walk all the way back again. Instead we went for waffles and Irish coffees!!
It did rain a little but we didn’t get too wet.
