I hadn’t planned to visit Calais, but I recently ended up there.
DFDS had emailed an offer celebrating twenty five years of their Dover Dunkerque route, you could buy a ticket for a day trip for just £25. What a bargain I thought.
I arrived at Dover in plenty of time for my 0800 ferry crossing. After passport control, I drove around to the DFDS check in. The man there said would I like to catch an earlier ferry to Calais at 0740, which would arrive fifty minutes earlier into France. I didn’t hesitate, would be nice to see Calais, which I had not visited since the 1980s, through had driven through a few times since after catching a ferry or driving through the tunnel.
As passport control is done at Dover, when I arrived in Calais, I was able to drive straight off the ferry and off to the town. Whilst I was on the ferry I had looked at parking places and had put one into Waze. Unfortunately as I drove there, following the route, one of the roads I went down was closed for roadworks. I made the detour, but got to the car park in the end.
I could see the Town Hall, which I remembered from my visits there in the 1980s. After taking a photograph or two I headed towards what I thought was the beach.
Nothing seemed very familiar, but it had been over forty years since I was last in Calais walking about. After checking a map at a shopping centre and realised I was going in the wrong direction. At the Town Hall I had turned left, when I should have turned right!
This time it started becoming more familiar. There had been some development, the Place D’Armes was very different to how I remembered it. When I went to Calais in the 1980s this was very much either a car park, or where the market was. I remember there been a fair there on one visit.
I walked to the marina and then I walked to the Phare de Calais (lighthouse) before walking back to the car and preparing to head off to my originally planned destination of Dunkerque.
I enjoyed my nostalgic visit to Calais, it was a pity the weather wasn’t better.
This year I have planned to visit fifty places. Glastonbury Tor is the first of that fifty.
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