Got back home a couple of days ago after a 16 week trip to Spain. The most I did when on Promotor’s was eleven weeks but that was work of course. Weathers been great with only a couple of slightly soggy days. Wore shorts every day until back in France. Nothing exciting happened to comment on down there. At least I didn’t have to hear about Brexit which was a bonus. I was hoping to find our old driver Steve Smith who lives down there but I wasn’t near enough to the village where he and his wife live.
Been some interesting posts on here recently from mushroomman. Will see if theres anything I can add to them later. Took a few pics on the trip home in France which may be of interest. My MacBook Air has been playing up something cronic lately so yesterday I got into the machine and completely wiped the hard drive clean and downloaded the High Sierra operating system onto it. However, if this post comes out back to front you know I have screwed it up and made it even worse.
I shipped over Cherbourg/Poole, a journey of about four and a half hours. I had a cabin and as I lay in my bunk I thought back to the times I shipped over Zeebrugge/Dover all those years ago on the Townsend boats. Many times it was a night boat and after a meal it was off to the cabin to grab as much sleep as possible. However, we never got enough. As soon as we were near the South Goodwin lightship those immortal words were broadcast over the ships tannoy, “Point Alpha, Point Alpha” and the steward in charge of the cabins came round banging on the doors for us to vacate them as he wanted to clean up and remake the beds even though there was still forty minutes to go. The drivers, all bleary eyed, would then congregate back in the restaurant and drink tea or coffee until called to disembark. We would then drive through passport control and park up as near as possible to the customs building where we deposited our papers unless we were clearing forward. Often we were told to get our heads down back in the lorry as the customs men were very busy. Maybe we would return two or three hours later to hear those dreaded words, “they want an inspection drive, back on the bay”…AAAAAGH.
