Rouen; Monday, 09 July, 2018

I woke up around 7am and had a quick shower before heading down to the ship reception to find out if there was any more information. At that point they were still hopeful of setting sail later in the day, and with a breakfast voucher I headed to the restaurant for breakfast.

By 9am things were changing and after we’d all checked out of our cabins we were informed that we would all need to disembark at 10:30 and go back through French immigration to wait in the terminal, and then we would be re-boarded when the ship was ready to go.

By the time we got through immigration and into the terminal building plans had changed again. The technical fault at Newhaven was much more serious and wasn’t going to be fixed, so instead we were back to the original plan of buses up to Calais, just 12 hours later than could have happened.

By midday the coaches still hadn’t arrived, and tempers were starting to get frayed with the lack of information from above clearly not helping the staff on the ground. Finally, around 12:15 the first of the buses turned into the port and a Ryanair style scrum to board ensued. It was clear that there wasn’t enough space for everyone, and in the end, they needed two more buses to cater for everyone, so it was 1pm before our convoy, complete with a van carrying all the cyclist’s bikes, set off on the long journey back to Newhaven.

It was more than two hours driving before we finally reached the port at Calais and after clearing immigration yet again we made check-in for the 5pm sailing with moments to spare and soon after we were getting off our coach and heading up to deck on our new ferry.

An uneventful crossing, with no turning back involved, we landed at Dover and re-boarded our coaches for the journey to Newhaven. Except it wasn’t to Newhaven, it was instead to a coach park in the docks where three British coaches were sitting with passengers going in the opposite direction, and so we had to get off of our French coaches, collect our luggage and swap with the passengers heading back to Dieppe on to the British coaches to complete the journey back to Newhaven.

Over two hours late, and 23 hours and 40 minutes after we should have arrived at Newhaven the coach finally pulled into the car park of the ferry terminal and everyone, now exhausted, disembarked and started on the final leg of their journey home, which in my case was extended by Southern cancelling the next train so I had to sit on Newhaven Town station for nearly 40 minutes.