Tangled Up With The French Police

During my semester in Cheltenham, England with BCA Study Abroad, my friends and I were fortunate enough to have a class schedule that gave us long weekends off. So, we maximized this opportunity by planning trips to various countries throughout Europe over various weekends. On one such 4 day trip, we explored Switzerland and then France. However, we were what you would call budget travelers, and in the most severe sense of the term possible. We figured out the cheapest way possible to get where we wanted to go, and then we went for it. The problem is, when you're aiming for the most affordable option, it often means adding additional, drawn out legs to your journey and booking everything in advance. Well, on this particular trip, we have planned to get back to England on a Sunday by taking the train from Paris to the French port city of Calais and then taking the ferry across the English Channel to Dover. From there, we planned to take a train back to London, where we would grab a late night bus back to Cheltenham in time for classes the next morning. Tired yet?! However, as our luck would have it, we missed the second leg of our journey home (the ferry across the English Channel from France to England) in the most melodramatic way possible. The scene involved the 5 of us girls running down a highway with all of our luggage like crazy foreigners, trying to climb through a hole in a fence desperately trying to get to the ferry, and being questioned by French police as a result. Thankfully, it all worked out eventually, and after being escorted by the French police to a later ferry and arriving to the White Cliffs of Dover in the dark, we ended up having to take a bus to another train station (because the train wasn't working in Dover for some reason-go figure!), where we caught the train back to London and then had to buy new bus tickets back to Cheltenham because we had more than missed the bus we had booked in advance. Can you say domino effect?! Needless to say, the 5 of us will never forget that trip!