Calais to Crete Again: sorted!!

Our chosen base for the last UK night was really convenient for Dover port so we glided in and were offered the next sailing at no extra cost! A smooth - quite busy - crossing with sunshine and optimism brought us into France, and on our way back to Crete for the eleventh long summer there! We had a plan, of course, based on growing wisdom about the possible and desirable, and this one worked very well!

The first stop was Carrefour in Calais for those essentials cheaper than in UK:- diesel and wine boxes!! Then steadily down the autoroutes to Reims (or Rheims to Brits)! This would have been an early evening arrival after the planned ferry but with the various "fair winds" we were there with time to spare in the sun, so we made a swift decision that the now clear humiliation of May and the Right-Wing Press in the previous day's unnecessary election was worthy of extravagance; so we bought a bottle of the local produce and consumed it well-chilled in the corner of the Campanile bar-restaurant watching French TV's take on UK affairs. Near Bliss! After dinner Bob composed an e-mail commentary to friends entitled "In our Wildest Reims".


Next day we set off in a south-easterly direction with Ruth believing we would be repeating a route used twice before involving a long tunnel, but Bob's highly abbreviated directions based on the alternative longer but quicker one on the A4 and skirting Metz, After some altercations around under-preparedness by the navigator we stuck to the latter and it worked well enough, and we reached Colmar with a sunny afternoon ahead of us. We were staying near the "airport" and the view was dominated by a replica of the Statue of Liberty in the middle of a roundabout.  After inspecting it we decided that was probably the extent of Colmar's sightseeing for Greyrocks and we went in search of a beer! After some false starts we ended up on the terrace of the Ibis watching kids in the swimming pool and various aerodrome activities. Very pleasant  - if expensive! We then ate early - in bright sunshine - at the neighbouring Courtepaille and turned in in preparation for the "long day" ahead!

Whoops!

The A36 would take us due South and parallel to the Rhine towards Basel and Switzerland. It was a sunny Sunday  morning with little traffic, but somewhere near Mulhouse we found ourselves devoid of references to Basel and realised we had managed to get onto the A35 heading West and a long way from a junction! A bit of a detour - but a chance to get cheap diesel in a Mulhouse supermarket, and - we hoped - not a significant loss of time with impact on the Gotthard Tunnel queue! In fact the traffic gods were with us all day! It took five minutes to get through Swiss customs and vignette purchase, there were no roadworks and - having stopped for a scratch breakfast at a service station with a free bizarre Portaloo and a second pre-Gotthatd lay-by, we sailed straight through the tunnel with no queue at all! Emerging into even sunnier conditions we noted the queue going North was extensive, but we now had just lakes and mountains to our overnight stop at the South of Lake Lugano, which proved only slightly difficult to find owing to road signs confusing municipality with town itself!

We reached the albergho in Capolago as its restaurant was clearing lunch thus raising the great "Get out of Switzerland" issue. Greyrocks would prefer to not engage with Swiss prices for anything bar the motorway vignette (paid cash Euros), but to get across the country in a day is a bit too much when considering the tunnel, and we haven't yet found a hotel just over the Italian border. Hence we were in Italian-speaking Switzerland on a very hot afternoon refusing to visit an ATM for francs!

But this is not Luzern, and it was soon clear that half the cars around were Italian and no business could afford to turn up their nose at euros at parity! Across the road we found a bar with a lido of lawn running down to the lake with swimming and canoeing by excitable folk. How unSwiss! Our currency offer was willingly accepted and we enjoyed several expensive drinks watching the activity, then took early supper at our own hotel:- limiting ourselves to pizza and salad given the price list, but indulging in a bottle of Prosecco.

We were back to the EU and sensible prices in a matter of minutes on Monday morning, and back on the autostrada traffic conditions were Italian! But it has to be done so "Keep Calm and Carry on!" As last year we were overnighting just off the Bologna Northern tangenziale, but in a different hotel for which we had conflicting final driving directions. Overhead autostrada warning messages became increasingly insistent that there were closures ahead owing to an unspecified incident and naming a junction of interest to us, so we avoided that one and ended up confused and seeking carabinieri assistance!!

"That'll do for one night!"

Not again, but we got there in the end!!

A high quality hotel at a good price, with a nice room, good WiFi, and so on! We spent a leisurely afternoon outside in the sun, and ate a pleasant dinner in their restaurant. Breakfast was a bit of a bear-pit with coffee rage, but we soon rejoined the A14.

Half an hour of stressful rush-hour lane changes ensued, then it was a straight run to Ancona. The final stage of the journey to the port had appalled us last year with its surfaces and signage, and another year of the Italian economic problems had not helped! We arrived at check-in with just the right time margin and were told we would have to take the bikes off the rack as we would have to go down to the lower garage as the upper was full! (We could pay for more height but we would lose all discounts and cost the Earth!!}
In fact it was not a great problem as unlike last year the weather was good and the ship ready to be loaded, We wheeled them on and locked them to some kit then went back for Yvette.

The ship was Hellenic Spirit from the ANEK fleet. Click here for a tour! A good one but the Superfast vessels (their partners) have far better WiFi arrangements, so no streaming for us - but we had a good cabin and treated ourselves to dinner in the à la carte restaurant. The only real down side of the voyage was ghastly behaviour by a huge US student party with leaders nearly as bad! They fortunately disembarked at Igoumenitsa as did the vast majority of tourists:- a tortuous process with stuck camper vans etc, which we watched from the deck, and which meant a late arrival in Patras was inevitable! It was just a couple of hours of delay in the end and we drove off easily picking up the bikes as we did so. And so to the next Nice Surprise: the Patras-Athens National Road is finished and has just opened! As you can read the work began in 2007, as did Greyrocks' frustrating journeys between the ferry ports. Now all those elegant tunnels and elevated sections mean an infinitely better and quicker driving experience (and on this date mostly free as the toll booths are not yet operational!) The shorter journey time was important as we were - for the first time - having just an afternoon to complete it, when it has previously been a long day with time to kill. It was odd to drive past the turn to our habitual fish restaurant lunch spot. In not much over two hours we were cleverly finding the correct route to avoid Piraeus town and joined a tiny queue of vehicles beside the ship. Chaos ensued with random decisions about loading, no police in sight, foot passengers unloading all their worldly wealth from an idling and badly parked car, cutting in, gesticulations of bravado and despair.. and all on a very hot evening! The worst embarkation we have experienced and onto the biggest ferry! The opening sequence of "Zorba the Greek" comes to mind!

" F/B Eleftherios Venizelos" is a monster. Our cabin turned out to be on deck 10 and the lift was out of order and the toilet not flushing, but hey - we felt relieved to be aboard at all after all that grief! From Deck 11 the view of port life was as wonderful as ever in the evening sun, and the deal of gyros pitta and cold draught beer was a good one!
Next morning we awoke with Souda Bay, Chania in sight.  Nine weeks since we flew into Barcelona and now the Cretan summer could begin - but only if we could leave the ship! Read on!