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The town of Dover
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My husband
only stayed a night in Ireland and then made the journey back to England to
retrieve our Pepsi Can and attempt to get it repaired, which he did, but not before
one of the windows was broken and this had to be repaired also. This breakage occurred
at a car boot sale when a friend locked his keys in the car and they could not
break into the car to retrieve them even though they used every means possible. It seems that the one redeemable feature of
the Pepsi Can was that it was impossible to force the lock… that is if anyone
actually wanted to do so in the first place. My husband told me that it was a
real attraction to the Algerians in London due to its number plates rather than
it’s unusual design. Some went so far as
to kiss the car! Never underestimate the love that Algerians have for their
homeland… especially when it’s been a long time since they have been there. My husband finally drove it back to Ireland
professing all to be well… as long as he didn’t drive it past a certain speed… less
than 100 kilometres an hour, not nearly fast enough for the long
journeys on the motorway, which gave us the uneasy feeling of being in a child’s
toy pedal car. As it barely had space inside the vehicle for the 7 of us, we had
counted on buying a roof rack to put on top and carry all the shopping and
gifts we had acquired during our trip, but…… you guessed it, the roof was too
narrow to cope with any roof rack.
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Dover
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The one good
thing about our Pepsi Can (yes there was one), as my sister bemusedly pointed
out, was that whereas normally people stared at us in all our Muslim garb, whenever
we got out of the wretched thing they were more interested in the car than in
us. We were going out one day with some
members of the family travelling in two cars, and my Mum told me that her
sister had warned her not to attempt to travel in our car due to the fact that,
after travelling in it, the one and half hour’s journey from her home to my Mum,
she had found it so uncomfortable. But
my Mum wasn’t to be put off and traveled in our car and professed afterwards
that it was perfectly comfortable, which might be explained by the fact that
she had sat in the front while my aunt had sat in the back. The kids all complained of sore posteriors
from sitting in it for long periods of time and said that, by the time we returned to Algeria their bums were all seat shaped. Oh well.... better than going pear shaped I suppose.
My husband
and I packed the car the day before we were due to leave Ireland, or rather, I
gave my husband all our belongings and HE packed the car, as we were leaving in
the early hours of the morning before sunrise to drive to catch the ferry back
to England. After he had finished, my Mum
went out to inspect his handy work and came back into the house saying what a
great job he had done, managing to fit everything in but…..’there’s just one
teensy weensy little problem I can see with his packing,’ she said. ‘What’s that Mum?’ I asked. ‘Where are you going to put the children?’
she replied. ‘Well, actually, Mum, I was
thinking of leaving some of them behind as a little souvenir of our trip!’ ‘If
you do… I’ll post them back to you in an envelope!’ she replied. ‘Now, Mum, are you inferring something
negative about my little angels????’ I
retorted, to which we both fell about laughing which set off the course for the
remainder of our last night in Ireland.
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| The port of Marseille |
My Mum and I
both hated saying goodbye, and I have many heart rending memories of watching
her, (and my Dad before he passed away), standing in the doorway in tears as
she watched us drive away, so she said we weren’t going to say ‘goodbye’ but
just ‘goodnight’, we hugged and went to our beds. In the early of the hours of the morning we
crept out of the house (as quietly as a herd of stomping elephants), dropped
the keys through the letterbox and set off on the three hour journey to the
ferry. She said afterwards how surprised she was when she didn't wake until the sun was shining as she is normally a very light sleeper, and how it helped to dissipate some of her sadness to know that we had covered a good part of our journey by this time. As we drove along the empty road,
with the children snoozing in the back and me deep in thought, feeling inestimably
sad as I watched the first light of dawn creep across the sky, suddenly there was a van driving right up behind us, flashing its lights and beeping its
horn, and before we had time to think it passed us out, but not before it’s
passengers turned on the light inside the van and we saw my brother and his
work mates waving and laughing at us as they sped by starting on their long
journey to work in Dublin. I must admit
it made us all laugh and definitely lightened the mood for the rest of the
journey Alhamdulilah.
We stayed for
a couple of more weeks in England, meeting up with friends and some family
before we started the insurmountable task of fitting everything we had into a
space that was half the size necessary to fit it all. It didn’t help that I had
accepted a homemade gift of dried flowers in a pot and swathed around a stick
which became the bane of our lives, or rather the lives of the children who had
to move it every time they got in and out of the car after climbing over bags
of books and clothes and other treasures.
I had to hide a couple of packets of cat food donated to me by a cat-mad
friend of mine, in one of the pockets of the storage bags strapped to the back
of the seats, in case my husband saw it and they would be the straw that broke
the camel’s back. The fact that we didn’t
have any cats was neither here nor there.
This particular friend had visited us in Algeria and had attracted all
the stray cats in the neighbourhood to our door, and, it was for these cats the
packets were intended.
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The port of Algiers
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Eventually we
started off down the road to Dover, to take the ferry back to Calais, with all
of us dealing with this particular crossing with military precision, taking
travel sickness medication and staying out on deck for most of the hour’s
crossing. We had left plenty of time to
make the journey across France to Marseille taking into account the snail’s
pace at which we were forced to drive, and without any hitches we arrived in Marseille in plenty of time for the ferry.
Although admittedly by this time, the children all had the imprints of
their knees embedded under their chins.
Once we drove into the port to await the ferry we were unable to leave
the port again and it had absolutely nothing to recommend itself in the way of
restaurants, shops or anything at all to distract us from the sheer boredom of
having to wait around for hours. By the time we boarded the ferry for Algiers
the books had nearly all been read by the children.
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The port of Algiers
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After a
pleasant journey back to Algiers overnight, during which we met up with
friends, we finally arrived in the port of Algiers safe and sound
Alhamdulilah. Disembarking is always
quite stressful due to the risk of being asked to unpack your vehicle by the
customs, and with ours packed to the gills, it was even more nerve-wracking. My husband made dua (supplication) on board
the ferry to ask Allah to make it easy for us at the port, and then, he backed
it up with his own efforts: He asked me
to drive the car in the line-up of cars as we slowly inched our way through the
port while he guided me…. in English.
Sure enough one customs official amazed at the fact that I was ‘English’
and, obviously due to the Algerian registered car, living in Algeria, after a
brief chat with my husband merely had a good look inside the car and just waved
us through without asking to unpack it.
As we all breathed a sigh of relief whilst driving away from the port we
all proclaimed ‘Never Again!’ But……
never is such a long time… and…. in our case…..just two years because we DID do
it all again…… although this time….. not in the Pepsi Can which got the
heave-ho soon after our arrival in Algiers.
But I will leave that trip for another time inshallah.
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Algiers
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