We’re definitely heading to Australia. Dawn finished her job on Wednesday, and her UK visa expired yesterday - so to make sure she didn’t “overstay” we had a short trip over to France.
It’s been a long while since I’ve been on a ferry across the English Channel, and it proved to be a cheap option to head down to Dover and cross over to Calais. We headed over yesterday, stayed the night, and this morning came back to the UK. The immigration officer asked a couple of questions and wanted to see our onward tickets to Australia, then granted entry to Dawn - the first time she’s been in the UK as a tourist!
It was a bit choppy coming back across the channel which slowed down the ferry, which in turn meant that we had to pay extra for parking at Dover docks - we were over the 24 hour mark by 6 minutes when we got to the car park pay terminal, this 6 minutes costing an extra £5 parking fee!!
We’ve both wanted to have stopovers when travelling between the UK and Australia, so this time we’re making a bit of a trip out of it. It’s going to take 1½ weeks to reach Australia after leaving the UK, and then a further week until we reach our new home - Melbourne! Unfortunately we won’t be going via the Trans-Mongolian railway (Moscow-Beijing) which we had hoped to do, but we will be going on the Indian Pacific once we’ve got to Australia.