So what I thought I'd do was split commentary on my holiday up into a series of blog entries, rather than do one ginormous one.
Today it's all about the journey.
I was thinking back on it and the journey was a little weird - going out there was the ginormous continuous slog, but coming back took three days!
Now going out the original plan was that we were all going to go from Devon. At the time both my Dad and my sister lived in Devon so it made sense to me that I should go down there and we could all go together.
However, in the mean time my sister suddenly got a new job and, rather selfishly if I'm being honest, decided she was going to go from where she mow lives. But I, being a little worried at trusting Dad to make the journey on his own, still went down to Devon.
Now from a logical point of view this made the journey a little daft. We were flying out from Gatwick and that's really close to where I live - closer in fact than my sister. But I was driving down to Devon to then catch a train to Gatwick!
Unfortunately I also needed some new tyres for my car, but it turned out that the tyres I have are basically only used on my car, so they needed to be ordered in. This meant I had to get them changed on the day I was driving down, which made things more stressful.
Luckily the journey down wasn't too bad as they got the tyres in a bit earlier than expected. However, due to the time the train set off I had to go to bed really early. As you might expect I was a little excited so I hardly slept a wink and then we were up and off to the train station.
The train took several hours. We also made a bit of an error by technically getting the wrong train; although really it wasn't the wrong train as such, it was actually the other option we could have taken, but hadn't wanted to as it meant more changes.
The reason for the error was that on the platform we changed to there were no announcements as to where the train was going, nor was there any board or sign up saying where the train was going. So, wrongly, we assumed the next train arriving was ours and got on it.
This was also where the weirdness of my driving to Devon and training it back became obvious - we stopped at several stations that are literally just down the road from me :/.
Anyway, we arrived and then we had the ordeal that was check-in to go through.
I've never flown before, so this was my first time and I was amazed at the amount of faffing about and waiting around there is. The flight itself was only one and a half hours long, but all the pissing about was twice as long as that - bloody daft.
Flying itself was odd. I can't say I really enjoyed the experience, but equally I didn't freak out or anything.
I'm afraid of heights and there was a moment when we were tacking off where this kicked in, but as we got higher it seemed to fade away. However, I did have a few moments where I had a light-headed, swimming sort of feeling about there being nothing underneath me for 30,000 feet.
Also we had some turbulence and I was really not a big fan of that at all. According to me sister who's a seasoned long-haul traveller, that wasn't really bad turbulence, but it was enough for me.
The worst part was watching the wing wobble - it was only a short haul flight so it was a small plane and apparently the wings are stiffer on bigger planes, but when you're in the turbulence you can actually see the tip of the wing wobbling up and down by several metres. It's very disconcerting.
Anyway, we arrived safe and sound in Marseille, but we were actually staying in Nice, which, it turned out was a 3 hour coach driver away. Okay, fair enough, but we had the comedy coach driver from hell.
He was very late picking us up, which isn't great given all the waiting around we'd already done. He also didn't speak a word of English. But worse was that halfway through the journey he pulled into a service area.
Our tour manager was a bit surprised and asked him what he was doing and it turned out he'd been on the road for 8 hours and so legally, had to take a break. So we all improvised some dinner and then set off again.
The kicker was that when we arrived in Nice it turned out he didn't know Nice at all. Now Nice is clearly a horrible place to drive around anyway - it's got loads of one way streets and there's also a motorway flyover that's so low coaches can't get under it. So it's a difficult journey to get to the hotel anyway and add into that he didn't have a clue where to go and so it was... fun.
So that was the journey there - I'd estimate that I basically spent something like 30 hours travelling with only a (rubbish) sleep in the middle.
The return journey was a lot smoother in the sense that there were no cock ups and we knew where we were going and doing. But as I say it took me three days. Basically on the first day was the coach journey to Marseille and the flight. We then stayed in the Travel inn near the airport.
Initially I though this was essentially a waste of time, but let's put it this way - I was in bed, asleep a mere hour or so after getting there. It didn't help that it had the worlds most rubbish air conditioning system that simply didn't work - oh how I longed to be able to simply open the window.
The second day was the train journey back. Then we had to pick up Dad's dog, which took hours as the kennels were bloody miles away. Plus when we got back I had loads of stuff to put in the car (I was taking my sister's sofa thing back with me).
That took so long it would have been daft (and dangerous) to attempt to drive back that evening.
So that meant sleeping over so the third day was when I finally drove home.
Blimey!
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