This was Mick’s and my third crossing of the English Channel – but it was the first at night, and the first at this time of the year – nudging on to winter.

And, the trip was very bumpy. In fact, I did not get much sleep at all, I was a little worried we might be asked to board the life rafts.

The evening started off perfectly in Le Havre last night – the weather was cool but clear.

I took this photo of our boat with the Lego-like sculpture in the background (which is actually made of colourfully-painted shipping containers) about two hours before we were due to board.

We used that time to have some dinner, and we really ‘lucked in’ finding a traditional French seafood restaurant, that was excellent.

Mick ordered the seafood platter for €13.50, but I was not too interested in those shell fish that looked like snails. He seemed to enjoy it all though.

We then walked to the terminal and found that we were part of a very small group (19 in fact) of foot passengers. The security check was pretty lackadaisical – we had to walk through a screening device which beeped if you were wearing a belt for example. The security officer said, don’t worry and waved the next person through. Then we had to have our passports stamped by the border force officers, and it was here that Mick and I realised that all the rigmarole that we had been through to get our 12 month visas was unnecessary. The officers did not check when we had arrived in France – they just stamped our passports in a free space and wished us well. The only hiccup was that for some reason Mick’s age came up as 2000 (yes two thousand), so everyone was giggling at that as we went to board the bus that was to take us to the ship.

Our room was very comfortable, even if it did not have a window.  (We did not choose an outside cabin because it would be dark for the full 9 hours of the journey.)

Just as an aside – this trip was very cheap. A few weeks ago we had caught the night train from Perpignan to Paris where we had a sleeping berth, and that had cost us around $220AUD each. This trip cost us $200 for the both of us.

Anyhow, once we had dropped our luggage into our cabin, we went off to explore the ship and its facilities.

We had a drink in the bar with a few other passengers before heading to bed – hoping to be gently rocked to sleep for the rest of the night. At 1.30am though, the ship started to rock and roll, and started to make a few weird sounds. This continued until 5.30am – half an hour before we had to get up.  So by the time we arrived in Portsmouth, Mick and I were both feeling pretty exhausted.

We caught a taxi to the railway station and caught a train to Southampton, where we will spend the night before we start our first UK house sit on this adventure in Bristol tomorrow.

Christmas decorating was in full swing here too – so it is not only the French who make a big effort installing huge Christmas trees to get everyone into the spirit of Christmas.

The Christmas Markets were on in Southampton – and the High Street was decorated to the hilt. A few hours later after I took this photo, hundreds of people were enjoying the stalls of food and drink, even if the weather was not perfect.

Mick and I spent the rest of the day people watching and enjoying being able to understand was people were saying.