What can I say… this was an interesting one for sure! This was a family trip to Calais in France, just for the day, on 21st December 2023, which ended in a very unexpected way…

The purpose of this trip was to stock up on cheap, quality French wine and groceries, and it was also generally a good excuse for a day out. We drove from London to Folkestone, Kent, where we took the Eurotunnel, or “LeShuttle” to Calais. There were four separate parts to this trip – the amble around Calais town and to see the town hall, the stop-off at the wine warehouse, the expedition (!) around an enormous French hypermarket, and a jaunt to the equally impressive “Cité Europe” shopping centre. A fair portion of our time was spent simply wandering around and taking in the sights, and in fact I ended up not even buying anything on this particular trip.

I am not a fan of beer or wine, therefore the wine warehouse part of this trip was a bit lost on me! The wine warehouses in Calais seem very much aimed at the British, and all offer information on tax refund schemes for their UK customers. These such refunds can be claimed via going through a process on an electronic terminal at either the channel tunnel or the ferry port, when en route back to the UK.

The meander around Calais town and the town hall in particular was of more interest to me – the town hall and its grounds were decorated for Christmas, or “Noël” in French, along with the inclusion of a mini nativity scene and real life ponies and donkeys, to add to the festive spirit! We stopped by a shopping centre here, which seemed to have half the shops closed or boarded up – a sign of the times perhaps? The lunch at a little café here was decent, however, and good fuel for what was to come in our day ahead.

The hypermarket was something else. Never in my life have I seen such a huge “supermarket”. It was in fact somewhat intimidating! Full of shoppers whizzing around in a hurry, long queues on each checkout, and offering an array of different brands for each individual product, it was an experience that I found a bit of a shock to the system! The prices didn’t seem that much cheaper than in a UK supermarket, therefore I decided not to buy anything on this occasion, and to instead “soak up the sights” (?!) of what was going on around me. One shopper left with a trolley half full of just baguettes – is this normal behaviour in a French hypermarket? Maybe it is!

The Cité Europe shopping centre was a bit more “me” – shops of both international and French origin all intermingled in a building of a size to rival that of Westfield in London or Bluewater in Kent. You can therefore buy almost anything that you could want or need here, and have a decent meal at any of the many cafés and restaurants, serving many different types of cuisine from Asian to Italian to British.

It is here that things started to go pear-shaped. We left Cité Europe in good time to make our shuttle back to the UK, only to find that both of the main routes to the shuttle terminal were closed. Scratching our heads, we wondered to ourselves why on earth this could be – was there an accident, or a technical issue forcing closure of the tunnel? Nope, it turned out instead that the French staff working at the channel tunnel had called a flash strike, and were refusing to get back to work unless their Christmas bonus payments were substantially upped! So what were we to do? We made a beeline to the ferry port, a short drive away.

We ended up waiting in a long queue of traffic to the ferry port for nearly 3 hours, before getting to the payment/passport booth and being told that the channel tunnel had just re-opened again! So after those nearly 3 hours of waiting… we ended up leaving to head straight back to the shuttle terminal again! By this time it was getting late, around 9pm, and we were hoping that we could in fact catch a shuttle back and would not have to book an impromptu hotel stay for the night. Luck was finally on our side, as after another nearly 1 and a half hour wait, we managed to get on the shuttle back home! The journey was the standard 35 minutes, and we all breathed a sigh of relief when the shuttle reached the other side.

Another nearly two hour drive back to London, and we were done for the day! We reached London at around midnight, which we hadn’t planned for at all, but at least we were all back safe and sound, and with all the goodies that my family had bought. I cannot say however that this trip hasn’t put me off travel to France in the future… if something like this can happen at the drop of a hat, how can you travel with any certainty that your trip won’t be completely upended and thrown into chaos? I don’t mind the odd blip in travel arrangements, in fact I am somewhat used to this, but unplanned industrial action on this scale is not something that I am used to or wish to get used to, if I can help it!

So, readers: have you embarked on a day trip to Calais before, and what are your opinions on this? Have you ever been caught up in industrial action affecting travel before? And if so, how did you deal with this – did it put you off travel, or at least travel to a particular place?