So for Christmas we left all the snow in Chamonix and drove to the UK to spend the holidays with Toby's family in Suffolk - his lovely aunt and uncle, Patty and Mike, have a beautiful place on the coast, and about 30 of Toby's family - sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews etc. gathered together for a very traditional English Christmas.
Driving definitely made sense for us (especially given the number of bags we had) and we went through the Chunnel on the Eurostar train - it was fab. Super slick, very well organized and only about 35 minutes on the train itself (you just drive on and off and stay in your car for the journey).
Since it's a 16-hour drive we decided to break up the journey and spend the night in Calais before catching a train early the next morning. This was a mistake ... We actually arrived in Calais at about 5.30pm and would have very happily just carried on driving straight to the train, and over. (Friends with small children take note: audio books have transformed our long car journeys with the girls now. 16 hours? Bah! That's nothing. On this journey we had Wind in the Willows and some rather funny stories about a bumbling wizard teacher called Mr Majeika.) But we'd pre-booked a hotel, and so a night in Calais it was.
The hotel was chosen pretty much at random from an internet site, and it was a two-star hotel (although as Toby observed - what does a hotel have to do to get a one star?). Glamorous, it wasn't. You couldn't actually walk to the bathroom (we were thankful to have one) you had to crawl over the beds, the room was so small. And yet I love the sheer innocence of the girls and their enthusiasm - they stay in hotels so rarely it is always a special treat for them. Even though we had drunken revellers partying directly outside our window for about two hours after the bars closed, Anna woke up in the morning saying, 'I had the BEST night's sleep', and Zoe stretched and said, 'That was SUCH a comfortable bed' (it was a pull-out camp cot) , and Indie kept on saying, 'This is such a nice hotel. Isn't this a nice hotel?' Jaded, they ain't.
I think what really made it for the girls was the fact that there was a mini-fun fair just outside our hotel - literally just a carousel and a candy wagon, but we got our dinner from a chip van (our 'ketchup' dinner, as Indie called it, and yes, everything was doused in ketchup), and ate it al fresco on a convenient picnic table (it was that warm) and then had some delicious freshly-made doughnuts (doughnut holes, really, called 'croustillons' and covered with powdered sugar) from the candy van. The girls, at least, were in heaven.
I then went out to a small bistro on my own with my book and had my kir and salad chèvre chaud, while Toby rested his bum hip. I can't say we'll be hurrying back to stay another night in Calais, but maybe it wasn't such a mistake after all.
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