My worst travel experience EVER!!!! what's yours?
Posted: 27 Oct 2025 18:34
Well, yesterday came along and it was time to leave our retreat in France and head home. It's normally a long journey, 12 hours or so, consisting of a 3 1/2 hour drive in France, about 6 hours faffing around with a ferry and a 2 1/2 hour drive in England.
It's a long journey, but well worth it, though we do often suffer delays on the English side on the way home due to the M25 being a horrible motorway.
However generally speaking it averages out around 12 hours.
This time though, the forces of evil were truly against us, resulting in a huge 28+ hour journey that started at 11:30 on Sunday 26th October and ended today, Monday 27th October at about 16:00.
Everything started just fine and our 3 1/2 hour journey to the ferry terminal went great and we boarded after a relatively short wait. The ferry left Dieppe a little early if anything at 16:00 (CET so 1 hour ahead). Journey time was the usual 4 hours, arriving pretty much bang on 19:00 GMT in Newhaven.
That's when things began to unravel. We were asked to leave our cabins and so all found a spot to sit, but the call for us to join our cars never came. After some time we were told the bow door lock mechanism was not working and they couldn't open the door to let us off. Nor could we go out and reverse in as Newhaven doesn't have a suitable dock for that kind of operation.
Portsmouth does apparently, so that's where they decided to send us. That was after some time listening to machinery being tortured by engineers with big hammers...
By this time we were back in our cabin and trying to get some much needed sleep. Eventually we pulled out and we thought "Ahh, we're off to Portsmouth. Except we weren't. About half an hour out, we get a message - "Portsmouth won't agree to take us, so we're going back to Dieppe. From there please make your way to Calais and present your boarding details and you will be put on another ferry to Dover there." Dieppe to Calais is about a 2 1/2 hour drive.
Admittedly Calais to Dover is just 90 minutes, but we still have another 2 1/2 hours from Dover to home.
Then knowing that if we want to go home we need to get to Calais, we get down to the car deck for yet another super exercise in waiting around for ages!!! The reason? Lorries were being reversed off out deck onto the jetty. In the dark...
Once they were off, cars were being three point turned to drive off normally. That killed another couple of hours. We'd been told 'Just go to Calais, it will all be sorted for you".
Thankfully, it was, but it didn't really make up for the lack of information (We were really kept in the dark to an amazing degree)
So by the time we got home, we'd done 8.5 hours driving. The remaining 20 hours was either spent sailing from Dieppe -> Newhaven -> Dieppe, waiting on the ferry whilst they attempted various fixes that didn't work, sitting in our cars waiting to disembark, getting through passport control leaving Dieppe for Calais, waiting for our tickets at Calais, going through 2 lots of passport control after that at Calais (Luckily that meant no passport control at Dover) and then waiting 2 hours for the ferry to Dover to arrive. Ho Hum...
It's been frankly awful and it totally wasted a day of annual leave for me...
I can say we survived it though :)
It's a long journey, but well worth it, though we do often suffer delays on the English side on the way home due to the M25 being a horrible motorway.
However generally speaking it averages out around 12 hours.
This time though, the forces of evil were truly against us, resulting in a huge 28+ hour journey that started at 11:30 on Sunday 26th October and ended today, Monday 27th October at about 16:00.
Everything started just fine and our 3 1/2 hour journey to the ferry terminal went great and we boarded after a relatively short wait. The ferry left Dieppe a little early if anything at 16:00 (CET so 1 hour ahead). Journey time was the usual 4 hours, arriving pretty much bang on 19:00 GMT in Newhaven.
That's when things began to unravel. We were asked to leave our cabins and so all found a spot to sit, but the call for us to join our cars never came. After some time we were told the bow door lock mechanism was not working and they couldn't open the door to let us off. Nor could we go out and reverse in as Newhaven doesn't have a suitable dock for that kind of operation.
Portsmouth does apparently, so that's where they decided to send us. That was after some time listening to machinery being tortured by engineers with big hammers...
By this time we were back in our cabin and trying to get some much needed sleep. Eventually we pulled out and we thought "Ahh, we're off to Portsmouth. Except we weren't. About half an hour out, we get a message - "Portsmouth won't agree to take us, so we're going back to Dieppe. From there please make your way to Calais and present your boarding details and you will be put on another ferry to Dover there." Dieppe to Calais is about a 2 1/2 hour drive.
Admittedly Calais to Dover is just 90 minutes, but we still have another 2 1/2 hours from Dover to home.
Then knowing that if we want to go home we need to get to Calais, we get down to the car deck for yet another super exercise in waiting around for ages!!! The reason? Lorries were being reversed off out deck onto the jetty. In the dark...
Once they were off, cars were being three point turned to drive off normally. That killed another couple of hours. We'd been told 'Just go to Calais, it will all be sorted for you".
Thankfully, it was, but it didn't really make up for the lack of information (We were really kept in the dark to an amazing degree)
So by the time we got home, we'd done 8.5 hours driving. The remaining 20 hours was either spent sailing from Dieppe -> Newhaven -> Dieppe, waiting on the ferry whilst they attempted various fixes that didn't work, sitting in our cars waiting to disembark, getting through passport control leaving Dieppe for Calais, waiting for our tickets at Calais, going through 2 lots of passport control after that at Calais (Luckily that meant no passport control at Dover) and then waiting 2 hours for the ferry to Dover to arrive. Ho Hum...
It's been frankly awful and it totally wasted a day of annual leave for me...
I can say we survived it though :)