Although there were distressing levels of gridlock at Dover at Easter, our Channel Tunnel crossing was relatively painless. I was convinced we’d pay for the relative ease of both our Easter crossings with a woeful Whitsun.
The usual red stretches appeared in the Maps apps as I plotted which route to take to Folkestone on Friday afternoon. In the end, I opted to take the Southern Route, which means a blast down the M40 and then and anti-clockwise loop past both Heathrow and Gatwick. Risky. It’s 20 miles further, but looked as if it would be marginally quicker on the day; the Southern route also avoids the Dartford crossing, which can be a horrible bottleneck, even with 4 lanes and automatic numberplate recognition. Either way looked like it was going to be super-busy, but the Northern/Dartford route took us 4 hours at Easter, so I gambled that it wouldn’t be worse going South.

And it wasn’t. It was indeed busy, with lots of stretches of much-reduced speed, but I think it’s fair to say that we were never static for more than a half minute. We reached Folkestone shortly after eight. Check-in for Le Shuttle was pretty fluid (there were longer queues for the rich person’s queue-jumping option, Flexi-Plus, which made me laugh).
There are modifications happening around the terminal car park. Extra electric charging points being installed, and other stuff going on, so traffic heading for passport control was being directed against its normal flow. This looked as if it might be challenging, and it took a few minutes to get in to park because traffic heading out and in were both going the same way. As at Easter, there was a lot of traffic, but it was fluid.
A quick trip to Pet Control for Oscar, and an earlier crossing was offered at no extra charge. We took it, but it looked unlikely we’d be on a train at the indicated time of 21:05. I was quite pleased with my lack of anxiety at this point. I ate a bag of Hula Hoops and stood watching the outdoor screens as the traffic ebbed and flowed.
It was apparent that things were not too bad, because of that ebb and flow. It got busier when letters were called and then died back a bit. I saw the usual evidence of people being terrible: cars whose letter had not been called heading off anyway, and basically being in the way of people who were supposed to be in the queue for passport control. Again, I didn’t get stressed, because I think my silent curses and the karmic wheel mean that they’ll be pulled across for a explosives residue test, or get stuck behind a ditherer. Or come back as a dung beetle when they die.
When we were called, it was actually fairly quiet. I mean, there was a queue for passports, but you had to drive a few hundred metres to join it. Passport Control assholery was again low, and we were through and through really quick. Again, the Special Queue For Special People (Flexi-Plus) seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. I refer these people to Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.
We arrived in France around 11pm local time. It was a clear night, dry roads (a contrast to Easter!), and we were in my car, which is a bit of a hypermiler. We’d managed a very pleasing 59mpg on the way to Folkestone in that heavy traffic, and although we were blasting along motorways with the cruise control set at 130kph, we had no need to stop for fuel. In fact, as we left the train, my car’s computer was predicting a greater range for the fuel that was left than it had when we set out from home with a full tank.
After a bit of a wobble at Easter, I was back to being hardcore in terms of the overnight drive. We made three short pitstops: a bit of a walk, a coffee, a toilet break; and crossed France in just over 6½ hours, including the stops. As we drove up into the hills past Vesoul, the sun was rising behind the purple mountains ahead of us and all was good with the world.
Twelve hours, door to door, and really no complaints about being stranded on this busy travel weekend. And the lesson, as always: people really enjoy leaving the UK.