Geonord Air
Ah! Time for GeoNord again. It was a great caching event last year (see Valenciennes). Minimus and I decided to go and have another pop at it to see if it would be as good this year. This year it was held in Saint-Omer, which is a conveniently short drive from Calais compared to last year. It was a good weekend.
Friday Night is M25 Night
Friday was our travelling day. It was still term time and hence I couldn’t really take Minimus out of school early. I know some parents do, but not me, well, not for this at least.
I took a half day off to make sure that I was actually ready to go as soon as Minimus was done with school, and I used the time between giving up work and fetching Minimus to get my car cleaned and to pack my bags for the weekend.
We had arranged to meet our companion for the weekend, Happy Hunter HP20, somewhere down near Milton Keynes railway station. We were a bit late because I forgot my walking boots, so I had to go home again. While we were there I thought I might as well let Minimus get changed out of her school clothes too. She had sort of grudgingly accepted the possibility of travelling to France without getting changed. So when the opportunity presented itself I figured we might as well exploit it. Anyway, despite us being late, HHHP20 was still at the station. Like he’s going to get a grump on and go home again for the sake of 5 minutes.
Back at the plot, all of this meant we found ourselves at Milton Keynes railway station with approximately 4 hours to relocate ourselves to the Channel Tunnel terminal at Folkestone. Under normal conditions that would be fine. However, this was abnormal by virtue of it being a Friday night in the summer. I have said in many previous blog posts that I don’t like to assume that the M25 will be OK on a Friday night.
Going Underground
On this occasion, it was not too bad. We were around the other side of the QEII Bridge in less than two hours. Cool. We arrived at the terminal expecting we might get an earlier train, and true to normal form we were offered at check-in the opportunity to use a train 40 minutes earlier than my booking. Sorted. I like that. And look ! Here’s the photo of the bridge that I always add into posts where I’ve crossed it.
We had just about enough time to munch our way through some dinner of the fast-food variety before jumping back into the cache mobile and doing the doings. There were some shenanigans with people driving up the lane to my right and then attempting to butt their way into our stream. Some numpty in front of me actually let one car come across.
People apparently don’t realise that once you are through the passport control at Folkestone you’re just going on the next available train, regardless of what your ticket says. There is no need to jump lanes to try to get on your scheduled train. Anyway, the place was quite quiet. Once we got on the train, I noticed that the guy behind me, who’d been one of the “queue jumpers” that someone had apparently allowed to lane jump behind me, had a ticket for two trains later than the one he was now sitting on. So he wasn’t late for his scheduled train at all, he was just trying to queue jump.
Vive la France
The train journey was as uneventful as it ought to be. We and we found ourselves in France at a nicely early 9:15 pm local time.
Our destination for the weekend, Saint-Omer, is only about 35km away from Calais, so even with a bit of suspect navigation we still found ourselves at the hotel in time to meet up in reception at 10 pm to go out for a beer.
Because it’s close to midsummer and France is an hour ahead of the UK, 10 pm is still tolerably light. We were able to mooch our way up into the town centre via our first cache of the weekend (La cathedrale Notre-Dame) in decent light. We found a bar on the square that served my new favourite beer (the Half Moon Brewery’s Brugse Zot), and settled ourselves in for a relatively relaxed beer and a bit of a session planning what to do on Saturday. Well, we were going caching obviously, but the “where” and the “when” bits still needed to be finalised.
