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| Photo by Tim Street |
| Lizzie Street on board the Pride of Calais. |
Rosemary will be taking the day off from blogging today, and I won’t be posting Colin Dugdale’s blog entry until the morning, so I’ll go ahead and provide some more details than usual this evening.
First of all, apologies if some of you have had trouble accessing the blog today. I know lots of you are reading and counting on updates to know what the group is doing. It turns out the entire journalism web site was out for a time today because of a power outage on the Bloomington campus. When the journalism school doesn’t have power, the Web site can’t be accessed. It also precluded me from posting earlier.
Today was a day devoted entirely to travel. We embarked southwards this morning on a coach bus from our hotel in London to travel to Dover – where, as we can all now attest to, the cliffs really are white.
There was a bit of confusion with our ferry ride across the channel to Calais. There are two major operators that run ferries across the narrowest part of the English Channel between Dover and Calais – Seafrance and P&O. Our tickets were originally scheduled with Seafrance, a French-operated company. However, the workers of Seafrance went on strike last week, so we had to get our tickets transfered to the P&O ferry.
The ticket confusion was compounded by the fact that the ferry companies were incredibly busy today because yesterday’s high winds kept all ferries in port. As such, there was a huge backlog of commercial traffic trying to get across the channel. The trucks (or "lorries," as the Brits would call them) were lined up for quite a distance.
Despite the travel drama, the group remained in high spirits, and we traveled across the channel and arrived in Calais only a couple of hours later than we had originally planned. Most of the students had never been on a ferry the size of the Spirit of Calais before, and as such, it was a unique experience. The channel was a bit choppy, but luckily no one got very seasick. You can certainly see how soldiers in the landing craft of the allied invasion force would have gotten seasick on D-Day, though.
Once we arrived in Calais, our charter coach met us just outside the ferry, and we loaded our luggage and departed for Caen. After a brief bit of trouble with a curious backup on the French highway – apparently traffic jams for no reason aren’t unique to the United States – we were on our way.
We’re all here now at the Nôvotel in Caen. We checked in, ate dinner, and are relaxing in our rooms. Tomorrow, we’ll spend the day hopping on and off our coach at various Normandy points of interest, including the Embarkment Museum, the American Cemetery, Omaha Beach and other interesting places with WWII history. We’ll be back again in Caen tomorrow night with two student blog entries.
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