Day 5: Travel day
Welcome
Yesterday we drove from Nijmegen, Netherlands, to Milton Keynes, UK.
I woke up to some good news. Late the previous evening the carnet had been found, left on someone’s desk at the shipping company in Brussels. This was a huge relief as the complications, both logistical and financial, that would have stemmed from losing this document could have been massive. Luckily adding a stop to pick it up on the way to Calais only added half an hour to our journey so we were able to leave at a very reasonable 9am and still hope to keep to our schedule. I snatched a quick breakfast right before our departure, enjoying a half of fried tomato, some sliced cucumber, two boiled eggs, a schmear of cream cheese, a slice of brown bread, two slices of fig bread, and three slices of watermelon.
Lifting Liz’s broken suitcase into the van.
A couple of hours after leaving the hotel we swung past the freight company’s logistics depot, perched on the edge of the airport just to the northeast of Belgium’s capital city. As Jon emerged from the reception with the familiar carboard binder we allowed ourselves a small celebration. Just try and stop us from temporarily importing/exporting our equipment now.
Berend drove us away from Brussels on European Route 40, heading northwest to pass below Bruges and then pivoting to a more westerly heading, to enter France at its northern tip, by the city of Dunkirk. Soon we were approaching Calais and the check-in for the Euro Tunnel, where first we headed to customs/duty free to get our carnet stamped, followed by passport control and then we entered the queue of cars that were waiting to board the shuttle train. Though we have traveled the Chunnel a few times now, it is still a novel experience driving your vehicle through the side door of a train car which will then descend to 115m below sea level as it passes under the English Channel. This time we added a new element to the experience, the music listening technique known as a baker’s dozen. The chosen song was Arkansas rock band Evanescence’s I’m Going Under, a three-and-a-half-minute nu-metal masterpiece written about coming out of a bad relationship. Listening to this thirteen times was the perfect way to pass the 40-minute journey and we emerged into the crisp British daylight at Folkestone right as we were on the final play.
Here is a video for those with VR devices wanting to experience the channel tunnel from the perspective of a van.
Before continuing inland, we needed to get the carnet stamped by UK customs and this is where we ran into some trouble. We rolled into Stop 24 Services in Folkestone, ‘The last service station in England’, a facility where we could enjoy a lunch, a bathroom break, and take advantage of the on-site Inland Border Facility run by Channel Ports Ltd. on behalf of His Majesty’s Government. While Channel Ports Ltd. do claim that their instinct has always been to find new and innovative ways to improve the customs clearance experience, the 140 minutes we spent trying to get an import stamp felt like a poor innovation. We were missing a crucial piece of paperwork, one that we had never required at a proper UK border facility, and at took them an hour to pinpoint this fact, and then another hour before we could fabricate the document and complete this arduous process.
Not a triumphant fist punch that we like to see after a successful operation of the carnet.
At 6.30pm we were back on the road, ten and a half hours after leaving Nijmegen. We made it about 3km down the M20 before the traffic began to slow and then came to a complete standstill. We sat in place for an hour as emergency vehicles sped by on the shoulder responding to a collision some way ahead.
Liz passes the time by constructing a snack from a Real Rusk and some chocolate hail.
It was a relief when we began to move again, as we still had a good two and a half hour drive to the hotel. For nobody was it more of a relief than a young man with a small black pelican case who had been patiently waiting for us at Swanley train station for the past few hours as we accumulated delay after delay. Owen is joining us as a stage tech for these next few UK shows, helping us to iron the kinds out of some of those tough festival changeovers and make sure the patch is working as smoothly as it should be. We grabbed him and boarded the eastern section of the M25, London’s orbital motorway, beginning an orbit in an anticlockwise direction, up towards the Thames crossing at Dartford. We were all excited to cross the beautiful cable-stayed length of the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, and we were all incredibly disappointed to watch it disappear from view as we accidently went into the tunnel crossing instead.
📸 Gabriel Nardin
Around the same time we were realising that we needed to compose a dinner plan as it was a Monday night and the restaurants would be closing early. After some furious phone searching and a few calls we diverted from the M25 and headed to the town of Brentwood where we had found a promising pub with an available table. We parked and headed in only to find that they were full up, a disappointment that was meaningfully offset by this nice picture I took of the MAN basking in the setting sun’s rays.
Finally we found a spot a few minutes up the road, a Wetherspoons pub bearing the name The Dairyman. There were no farmers inside, only bland wallpaper and bold carpets belonging to a décor scheme that seems intentionally distasteful. For those unfamiliar with the Wetherspoons pub chain, it is maybe the only place in the UK where you can get a curry and a pint for £9, and maybe have a fight on your way out. It was quiet on a Monday so we didn’t have any fights but we did fill our stomachs with food and our hearts with comradery.
Throughout this incredibly long day Tristan’s wife Marsha had been sitting patiently in the back seat of the van, relishing the experience of a proper day of van touring. The few days we had enjoyed in Europe had been fairly relaxed so this was a nice contrast, a full fourteen hour transit with two carnet operations and a traffic jam. Sadly, it was time for Marsha to head home to New Zealand and we farewelled her as she hopped into the back of a taxi which would carry her to her overnight lodgings in London.
We said our goodbyes and continued north, somehow ending up on a series of tiny country roads for the remaining ninety minutes of the drive. At 12.30am we arrived in Milton Keynes where thankfully our hotel was still open and we all had beds ready and waiting. Berend had done a heroic job behind the wheel, driving a massive 700km over nearly sixteen hours and with a great attitude every step of the way.
Tristan has been working away in the background these last few days and finally he has created something he is happy to present to the public. Here are the video highlights from our short stay in Europe.
P.S.
Here is a submission from Anthony from Ireland.
