Upon arriving in Rotterdam late last night we had a hell of a time trying to find a hotel room. Not because it was particularly fun searching the city or because anything of interest occurred, just the boring old problem of arriving late at night and then finding a hotel. The sane thing to do would have been to book a hotel while we were using the Wi-Fi to book the ferry last night, but we were too busy enjoying the hotdog and browsing the web for sensible things such as that. When we reached city center Rotterdam we visited at least 5 hotels based on the suggestions of our GPS. The success rate of this GPS has been woefully poor in the past but we chose to believe in it one last time before the UK. Of the hotels we visited none of them had rooms available, otherwise we probably would stopped searching. The last hotel we checked was nautical themed and had one twin room left, which is why it was the last hotel we checked.

 

Unfortunately the nautical theme didn’t extend to a ferry themed car park so we had abandoned the car in front of the hotel for the night. This meant an early rise to find a parking meter before we risked getting a ticket. After a few hundred miles of walking through the streets we found a parking meter but unfortunately it wouldn’t take our cards. We concluded that we had made a valiant effort to pay for the parking which was a suitable excuse for contesting any ticket we did get, and returned to the hotel for our complimentary breakfast in the galley.

 

Because we hadn’t thought about where we would be staying for the night when we had booked the ferry we arrived a fair few hours early. To kill time we found a nice French restaurant to settle down and enjoy a traditional French meal. The classy establishment we chose was inside a supermarket. It came complete with the most stereotypical loud drunk Frenchmen shoveling cheese and wine into their French faces, while we sat quietly and put a large quantity of below average ham and chips into our British faces. Having been encouraged to finish our lunch as quickly as possible by the annoying clientele we still had time to enjoy the sights of Calais. We wondered around the horrible area surrounding

the supermarket/restaurant before concluding Calais does not have any sights.

 

At the port we were welcomed back home by the woman at the UK border crossing. She commented on the beards but had no issue believing that we were the same people on our passports despite us now looking about 30 years older due to the hard life on the road. As we waited we talked to a family from the car in front. They wanted to know if we had any stories of adventure to tell from our 56 days of exploring. Unfortunately the wait for the ferry wouldn’t nearly be long enough to go through the excoriating detail of this blog so we just told them the long list of issues we had with the car and gave them our website address instead - If for some reason you are still reading this blog I hope you managed to get home at some point in the last year, and I hope you framed that photo you took with us and placed it on your mantel piece.

 

On the boat the man directing cars asked why we were called The Gingerbread Men but didn’t need an answer once he had leant down to window height and looked inside. While we awaited passage to our homeland we did a spot of shopping to buy some souvenirs from our time abroad. Before we could even get into the shop and steal a few things the alarms went off. We spent a few minutes joking with the security guard before playing it cool and walking away. Clearly we looked sketchy because he called us back as searched our pockets and gave Chris his final cavity search of the journey. They didn’t have anything from Mongolia so Chris settled for the classic gigantic Toblerone which are only an acceptable thing to buy when at an airport and apparently also ferries.

 

For the short trip across the channel we sat in the bar area and remembered how annoying English people can be. The family behind us spent the first 45 minutes complaining about everything they had done on their trip to France, then spent the next 45 minutes whining about the ferry trip. That being said we have had no idea what people have been saying for the past two months so perhaps they are just as annoying. As we got back into our car and left the ferry, once it had docked not just to escape the English family, we were disappointed with the lack of “Welcome home Gingerbread Men” banners which didn’t line the gang-way.

 

On the short trip between Dover and Reading we tried to organize our courier service’s delivery for the liters of vodka. It turned out that Matthew wasn’t even going to be in Newcastle tomorrow, and trying to decipher where he would be was too much of a headache, so we would have to drop the bottles at Mile’s parent’s house in London instead. While we stopped to fill up the car with good ol’ British petrol no one seemed impressed that we had driven here all the way from Scotland. The first familiar face we had seen in 12 days since we left the Mongoliers in Mongolia was my brother waiting by his flat as we rolled in. Before unpacking our luggage he enjoyed the state our car was in, then refused to carry our bags inside. Inside he presented us with a welcome home cake he had baked himself. Baked is a strong word, he had taken a store bought sponge cake and crudely decorated it by hand with our logo. Then we spent the evening watching our videos, drinking Dominos pizza and eating beer.