Trifter

Either for leisure or business I travel to France regularly now and have been doing since I was 18 years old. I will never forget that first time though as I had never been abroad. The same goes for my two traveling companions, John and Glyn. The three of us made the long trip down to Dover in Glyn’s green Mini van and left it with another friend’s old Grandmother.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

We crossed over to France as foot passengers for some reason at about 2.00am and arrived in Calais at about 5.00am local time. What I remember more than anything was the complete ignorance with which we had embarked on this adventure. When we disembarked from the ferry my friend Glyn ran down the ramp as he wanted to be the first to stand on foreign soil.

It was still quite dark and we hadn’t got a clue what we were going to do, we had quite a lot of luggage with our tents so we made our way into Calais centre. It felt like we had landed on another planet as we looked around and saw shop names that we could just remember from school French lessons. My memory goes a bit vague here but I think we went to a cafe and started smoking our duty free cigarettes. I remember by about 10am we were bored with Calais and so we decided we needed a plan.

Somehow the plan became to buy a map and then scientifically chose an area to go to buy closing my eyes and hitting the map with my finger. As luck would have it we hit Caen so we looked at the nearest seaside to there and we saw a tiny little place called Riva-Bella and next to that Ouisterham. That’s where we are going we declared and I now had the chance to ask somebody “Ou est la gare?”