Dover

During the first week of class, a group of about 10 of us decided we were going to take a day trip to Dover to see the castle and the White Cliffs. We went and bought our coach tickets and were all set to meet up and head out to Dover last Saturday. Ann and I told our host mom about the trip and she told us that she would drop us off at a bus stop that would take us straight to Victoria Station where we needed to go to catch the coach. Dee and her sister were arguing about how long it would take us to get there on the bus; Dee said 20-30 minutes max because it was Saturday, Therese said at least an hour. Therese was right.

Dee asked me what time the coach was leaving and I told her 830am so she said we needed to leave the house by 730am and that would get us there in plenty of time. At 815am when we still weren't there, I turned around and asked one of the other passengers on the bus how close we were to Victoria Station and he informed us we were still at least 10 minutes away and then it was about a 5-8 minute walk from where the bus would be dropping us off to where the coaches leave from. Obviously we weren't going to make the bus. Now for me this is just a typical thing, but I felt bad dragging Ann into my misfortune. I called one of the guys and told him we weren't going to make it but were going to try to get the next bus out and we would hopefully meet them out there.

We got to the station at about 840am but of course the bus was already gone. We got in the ticket line and I tried to get them to let us on the next coach with the same ticket (like what happened with the Eurostar) but they weren't having any of that. The next bus was at 930am and as we were getting ready to pay for the tickets, the sales guy said in his cute British accent (the guy wasn't cute, just his accent) 'oh no! disaster!'. The coach sold out before he bought out tickets. Of course it did, I wouldn't expect anything less. That left us on the 1030am coach to the ferry port instead of the town square, but we didn't care we just wanted to go. We ended up paying almost as much for our one way ticket out there as we did for the round trip ticket, but oh well.

Since we had a bunch of time to kill, I decided I was hungry (I know, right? Crazy!) and got Burger King since that was the first thing I saw. I went up to order and got a sausage buffy. What exactly a buffy is I don't know, but it was a regular hamburger bun with sausage, cheese and ketchup. Not exactly what I was expecting, but oh well. I was most excited about my orange juice with no bits to be honest...



While I was eating, Ann sat down and somehow managed to get syrup or something sticky all over herself. And I mean everywhere. So since we had time to kill, we ventured off and got her some new jeans and by the time we got back it was finally time for us to head to Dover. I slept almost the whole way and when we finally got there it was already after noon.

We got dropped off at the port and stood there thinking 'now what?' so we figured we might as well take some pictures:

Now it's not like the port is right in the middle of the town or anything so we got ahold of some of the people in the group and they were at Dover Castle. We left the port and tried to figure out where exactly it was. We finally found it and oh my heck, it was a huge hike up to castle. I didn't really think we were going to be doing that much walking so I didn't bother taping my knee, but oh man, I should have. We literally hiked all the way from sea level to higher than the top of the white cliffs. It took me forever but I made it!

We were prepared for it to be cold and rainy and wet since it's April and we were on the coast, but it was a gorgeous day and the views from the castle were awesome. You can sort of see France if you look hard enough...