Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, just giving you a bit of a date stamp.

It's 1pm on Thursday the 6th of April. I'm saying that just because, well, I'm going to give you my assessment of how the Easter getaway is looking

so that you can, I hope, be prepared for, well, a great Easter getaway, if that is your

preference, or at least knowing where the delays and problems are. So I'm going to spin through

the issues as I see them. All the attention,

I can absolutely guarantee, is going to be on Dover, where I was yesterday. An interesting series

of messages from DFDS, that's the big ferry operator there to Calais and to Dunkirk.

Starting at 8 o'clock in the morning, they said 30 minute cues for border control.

By about 10 o'clock, it was 60 minutes.

By noon, it had gone up to 90 minutes for border control and now well they say it's looking reasonable once again

yes traffic is reflowing through border controls and check-in i'm not entirely surprised by that because

actually you do tend to get a surge as the morning goes on.

The way I kind of think of it is that people like to set off maybe about 8 o'clock in the morning,

get to the port depending on where they're starting from.

Well if it's from London, maybe 10 o'clock, or if they're going from the Midlands,

East Anglia, that will be more like 11 or noon. And once they've done that, they like to get

on a ferry so that they are in France by mid-afternoon, so that they can get to where they

need to be ideally before nightfall.

That is just human nature and that's how it works.

So you would always expect to get a surge in the morning and that appears to have been what happened.

The queues were quite long, well obviously 90 minutes wait at border control. I'd be

cheesed off with that. We've had the interesting assertion from the Rhodes Minister, who obviously

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