Finally the long awaited day arrived and we drove to the port of Dover for the ferry to France. Neither of us had been to France before, and in fact in all of our travels very little has been in Europe. We’ve looked forward to this for a long time.
The ferry is a relatively short journey, a mere 2-1/2 hours. Jack entered the ferry driving on the left and exited driving on the right. I only had to remind him once or twice to keep right, and by the time we exited the port his brain made the switch for good.
Everything we read about Calais advised against spending any time there. Two Irish women we spoke to in a car park in England warned about crime and people attempting to enter the UK illegally as stowaways in motorhomes. We like to think the best of everyone and while we listened politely, we dismissed the warnings as the usual anti-immigrant rhetoric.
We arrived in Calais just after noon and I had mapped out a trip to a laundry and a supermarket before driving to our first night’s parkup. The laundry was in the car park of a Carrefour supermarket in what we immediately saw is a rundown area on the edge of town. The car park was wierdly almost empty. We parked behind the washing machines and I gathered the laundry together and carried it around to the front of the kiosk. Jack stayed in the van.
There were three young men standing in front of the machines blocking my access. They didn’t immediately move away as you’d expect so I smiled, said “Bonjour” and indicated that I was going to do laundry. They stepped aside, and one of the men spoke in tentative English, something about washing clothes.
“Oui,” I said as I loaded the machine and set the program. I was curious why they would hang out at the laundry kiosk but I finished my business and went back to the van. Since we were going to be there awhile I opened the back door and turned on the LPG so we could run the refrigerator. Then I got back in the van and we waited for the wash cycle to end.
When my timer went off I went back to the machines to put the clothes in the dryer. There were only two young men there now. I set the program and started the dryer, then went to the back of the van to get something.
The door was slightly ajar. I know I hadn’t left it open. There was a shoe keeping the door from fully closing. That’s odd, I thought. Then I realized I didn’t recognize the shoe. Then I saw there was a foot in the shoe, and a leg connected to the foot. I swung the door wide to find the third young man crouched into the back of our van under the bed, folded up like a pretzel but not quite well enough to close himself in.
I was struck dumb. Well only for a moment, before I yelled, “What the fuck are you doing!?”
He looked me straight in the eye, then slowly and deliberately unfolded himself, climbed out of the van, and walked away. I stared after him, agape. Then I closed the door and went into the van by the side door, shaken and confused.
Jack was napping during all this and only woke when he heard me cry out but probably thought I was yelling at him. When I told him what happened we agreed we couldn’t leave the van unattended to go shopping together.
I walked alone to the Carrefour, halfway across the car park and out of sight of the van. The store was huge and mostly empty and dimly lit, not the first experience in a French supermarket I was hoping for. I was concerned about Jack and the van and the three young men whose intentions I couldn’t fathom, so I quickly picked up bread and other essentials, hoping we could find a better shopping option later.
When I left the store the three young men were now positioned by the shopping trolleys near the door. I wondered if they were following me but I shoved the thought out of my mind.
Back at the van we retrieved the laundry from the dryer and turned off the LPG. While we were preparing to leave the three young men walked toward us again, and as we drove off, the man who had climbed in the van looked right at me and smirked.
I don’t understand the encounter. We weren’t robbed. I didn’t feel personally threatened. But their behavior is a mystery. Later a friend suggested that perhaps the man who hid in the van was hoping for a free ride to England. But he hadn’t managed to hide himself well, and his smirk as we left lead me to think he just wanted to scare the old lady. If that was the case, he failed.
Even so it was an unsettling start to our European journey.
