DAY 1 – 16 Dec : Le Shuttle into France 🇫🇷

“Held my breathe under the channel”

The day started off at our AirBnb in Thame with a frantic last minute pack up effort in The Stable (our unit) followed by some Tetris in the back of our VW Golf. Incredibly we managed to pack everything into the cabby and said goodbye Jon & Julie. They have been our hosts at The Stable on two separate periods, both in 2021 and 2022 when we initially sought the country life and decided to pull the trigger. Best decision! We will also be renting their holiday home in Brighton for the first part of 2023. Another place to add to our list of ever-growing short stays/homes in the UK.

The road trip kicked into gear with a pit stop at our storage unit in Wandsworth to offload some of the extra bags and boxes to make the car “slightly” lighter. I must stress slightly here as the car still looked like it was setting off for a tour south through Africa culminating at the Cape of Good Hope in 365 days time, not 18 days across parts of Europe.

Next up was a stop at The Lockdown Cafe in Wandsworth where I ordered us some padkos (breakie) and take away coffees while Ash sat in the car and chatted to Dani, who herself was chilling out in Portugal for most of December. The next two hours involved a mixture of our Spotify Wrapped playlist and Ash sitting in the passenger seat working and answering emails. When we arrived in Folkestone, south Kent, we bought some booze at the Duty Free and queued to board Le Shuttle for the 14:50 departure to Calais.

The channel tunnel is 50km long and of that 38km is under the English Channel , making it the worlds longest undersea tunnel. Construction started in 1988 and was competed in 1993, costing £4.65bn (£12bn adjusted for inflation today). At its deepest, the tunnel is 75 metres below the sea level. That’s the same as 107 baguettes balancing on top of each other.

The train is about 775 metres long and gets pulled along at 160kpm through the channel. Impressively it only took us 35 minutes from start to finish and luckily we could hold our breathe that long after months of breathing exercises and training for this trip. I don’t know if it’s just me or my childlike sense of adventure and growing up watching the Magic School Bus on TV but I thought we were going to be seeing dolphins, sharks and schools of fish all around us haha. Like it was a glass tunnel of sorts? Fool.

After disembarking the shuttle in Calais we drove for one hour in a south easterly direction to Lens. Arriving there in the dark and with temperatures around -5 Celsius meant it wasn’t a time for much sightseeing. We still managed to take a walk down through the central high street, see some Christmas lights (image above) and then quickly head back to the car to find some dinner nearby and escape the cold. Ash found a good looking pizza takeout online called Pizza de nuit so we decided to turn up and order some for the flat. We barely got through the order with their English and our French but the “Pizza aux quatre fromages” (four cheeses) was proper delicious and an ode to French cheese.

We also got a meaty pizza and then sat around our kitchen table eating late night pizzas, drinking a French IPA we found in the supermarché and playing some Backgammon. Afterwards it was into bed where we watched Sins of Our Mother on Netflix (spoiler alert : religious nutter!) before setting the alarm for the morning check out and drive further south east to Reims… aka the heart of the Champagne region! 🍾 Bonsoir!