Wednesday 19th September 2018
[I am well behind in blogging but hopefully will catch up over the next few days].
It was a big moving day today, leaving Ireland and heading back to England. Our sailing from Rosslare was scheduled for 8am but we received a message stating they were trying to go early to avoid some weather. This all meant we were up at 4:30am and in the car by 5:15, since we had about 90 minutes to travel.
Stopped in Rosslare before checking in
There wasn’t much traffic on the road, so we got to the ferry terminal in plenty of time and our check-in was quick, so we were sitting in a line waiting for a while. Then a couple of staff came over and for some unknown reason, took the front four cars including us, checked our cars, and took us off to another area where we were promptly forgotten. After a fair bit of waiting, and seeing cars starting to be loaded, I got out of the car and gave the staff member a look to make sure he didn’t forget us until the end. Eventually, he called our four cars through a convoluted path to join the queue and finally we were loaded.
We had booked a cabin so we could get some sleep on the way over (three and a half hour journey). We picked up some breakfast in the bistro (not great, but edible) and took it back to our cabin. After eating, we relaxed and read and watched Netflix, and kept listening to announcements from the captain that we would be delayed, due to strong winds which were “over company limits for leaving port”.
Eventually and unfortunately, at about mid-day the captain announced the sailing was cancelled and we would all be accommodated on the 18:15 sailing, and that we had to disembark. The reason for unloading the vehicles made sense, because they would have to re-balance the ferry with the new vehicles scheduled at 18:15. But unloading everyone was a subject of significant grumbling, and the other issue was that clear information about what to do was not given. Anyway, we drove our car up the road to Rosslare itself (which is a bit of a ghost town), and then found a park in an empty hotel car park. We walked back to the terminal to get information, to find a line of people with the same issue. We were told to come back and check in again at 5pm. As we walked back up to our car, I took this video of another ferry company leaving port while ours was stuck.
We decided to drive to Wexford and take a look. That’s where the drama started, as we got an under-inflation alert from the car. We drove to the nearest gas station to pump the tires, and found that the first one we went to had a broken air pump. On to the next one, 10 minutes down the road, and I was about to PAY for air at the next gas station, when Chris noticed a bolt in the rear right tire. We parked in the gas station and I changed the tire, finding (as expected) that the spare was an emergency tire. We then drove to Wexford to Meylers Tyres, who I can highly recommend as they fixed our puncture and put the correct tyre back on for E15.00.
This used up all the time we had so we drove straight back to Rosslare and got in line to check in (again). The check in process was very slow, and when our turn came the staff had not transferred our booking over to the later sailing so we had to park and wait for it to come through. I was starting to get quite cranky, as the communication in the morning was hopeless, and the fact that they hadn’t transferred a few people’s bookings over was starting to look like extreme carelessness. Anyway, the agent checking us in was lovely and fixed everything up, giving us E30 in vouchers, a half price discount for our next booking, and a priority boarding pass which helped a bit to calm me down.
Before long we were boarded and got our cabin, which was a bit of a downgrade from this morning’s one (no fruit, bikkies, coffee and tea). We went quickly to the bistro and purchased our dinner with our vouchers and went back to the cabin to eat.
After watching a bit of Netflix I slept for about 90 minutes and was woken by the tannoy announcement that we were coming into port. Since we were in priority position we were soon off the ferry and in the front of the traffic heading away from port.
It was rainy and gusty but we had no issues getting to our accommodation. It was a long drive (about 4 hours) and there were a few roads closed but Google helped us navigate around that and we were finally in bed just after 2am.
Starship Heart of Gold 