Our return ferry is the day after tomorrow so today's essential task was to turn up at the Pharmacie de Baie de Somme at 2.45 for an antigen test. All went well, we found the store room at the back of the place that they had re-purposed as a testing centre and were seen straightaway. The white coated swab wielding one was efficient and professional but friendly, and the results negative.(Bon!) Shenzhen kun handed us a print-out of our results then our phones went ping. The email gave us a link to the French Ministry of Health site, clicking on it prompted an SMS message with a security code which enabled us to download a document with a QR code.
Getting into France a week ago was relatively simple. The French Government 'déclaration sur l'honneur' is easy to complete, an English version is readily available on-line, all you need is a completed paper copy and your NHS vaccination certificate and you are through passport control in a couple of minutes.
Returning to the UK is a little trickier. Firstly we needed to book a 'day two test' before we left, the UK site listing the private providers is confusing and the pricing all over the place. The provider reviews are almost all negative reporting the non arrival of tests or delays in receiving results. We will see how we fare next Friday.
Next you need to sort out a test in the country you are visiting to be taken no more than 48 hours before you arrive back in the UK. It was quite straightforward, but Gill is able to hold a basic conversation in French, how you might manage to book a test in Portugal for example if your grasp of the language was minimal, I am not sure.
Finally the online Passenger Locator Form has to be uploaded to the UK gov website two days before your arrival in the UK. Because the form is designed to cover everyone arriving in the UK from anywhere by any means other than surreptitiously by rubber dinghy, then it's a bit of pain to complete requiring detailed information about who you are, where you have been, and where you are going to stay in the UK. The only section that had me flummoxed was the bit about the post arrival Covid test booking number. Then I vaguely remembered that I had received an email before we left from our test provider with two numbers that I did not understand. I scrolled back through two weeks of unread messages and found them. Ping! Off went the form to Gov.UK, back came a PDF of our details and yet another QR code. These have become the rubber stamps of the digital age, ubiquitous tools of of an omnipresent bureaucracy, overt symbols of covert control.
Will anyone be interested in checking any of this stuff tomorrow when we arrive back in the UK? Maybe simply complying is sufficient, a kind of secular genuflection. That certainly seemed to be the case last October when we filled in reams of paperwork to cross Germany, Switzerland and Italy, none of it was ever checked. When we rolled up to the UK Border Control at the Calais Eurotunnel terminal and offered our carefully completed Passenger Locator Forms the guy in the booth simply waved us through claiming they'd be checked on the other side. Of course with the Tunnel the UK border post is on the French side, when you reach Folkestone you are off the train and straight into the M20. So, we will see if our papers are checked on arrival tomorrow, or if the whole palaver is simply a ploy to discourage foreign travel.
Aside from sorting out our tests we didn't do much at all in Le Crotoy. It's an attractive small port, very popular, lots of seafood restaurants. I suspect most of our fellow travellers in the aire were here for fruits de mer. We are not shellfish enthusiasts.
We did manage a more mundane gastronomic delight, the baguette Gill bought from Au Bon Pain D'Autrefois was unexpectedly delicious, it is only when you happen upon a place that cares about what a traditional baguette should look and taste like that you realise that most of the time the floppy things you buy from the supermarket is a travesty.
We had planned to cycle around the bay but the weather worsened and a chilly mist blew in from the sea. Instead we took a short walk along the sea wall. I could put a positive spin on the photos I took and claim they were reminiscent of the pale, pearly light that Seurat captured in the seascapes he painted along this coast in the 1890s.
Alternatively, I could simply accept that it was a dull afternoon and no amount fiddling about with the Google photo settings would improve them.
Next day, after a final Auchun shop we headed west, parking in an aire on the clifftops by the Tréport funiculaire. If anything the weather had worsened, the chilly mist alternating now with drizzle, blown horizontally towards us in a strengthening breeze.
We made two unsuccessful attempts to take a short walk. The first towards the funiculaire station which was cut short by an outbreak of horizontal drizzle. An hour or so later, now feeling a bit edgy due to the van being buffeted about by the annoying wind, we headed off to find the
mini-market hidden among the nearby social housing blocks. It was one of those boredom fuelled moments where buying some biscuits to have with a cup of tea became an irresistible imperative. Gill triumphed, foraging some delicious Swiss chocolatey concoctions from a shop largely stocked with cheap knock-off products well past their sell by dates. I had to absent myself, suddenly I was struck by a violent coughing fit, which is alarming for other people during a global pandemic. I don't think I am succumbing to the virus; despite the windy weather I still think the entire area is full of dust particles from the industrial scale wheat harvesting we have witnessed over the past week.
On the way back we made a detour to have a look at the view from the funiculaire without the horizontal drizzle. The white cliffs above Tréport are magnificent, but the dull weather seems to have affected our spirits. Back to England tomorrow, endishness sets in no matter the length of the trip. All we want now is an uneventful journey home.
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