Hello and welcome to the final independent travel podcast of the week with me, Simon Corder.

And it's another one of those, uh, moments.

I knew it was going to be tough this weekend for motorists heading across the channel from Dover to Calais and Dunkirk.

There's some good reasons for that safe prediction and that's because this is the first really big weekend since Brexit when you have had a large number of people travelling. Now, you might say, hang on,

well, last summer. Well, that was just after Amber Plus was brought in, suddenly saying,

oh yeah, you thought you were going to have a quarantine free holiday when you, and you could come

back and not have to self-isolate. Well, we've changed our mind and you've got to.

Now, it turns out that that was based on complete medical nonsense and was absolutely unnecessary,

but it was too late by the time we realised that hundreds of thousands of people tore up their travel plans.

At Christmas New Year, it was the

French with their Omnicron overreaction when they suddenly said, right, you're not coming in,

so no Christmas holidays in Paris, no New Year ski trips. So therefore, we have not been in the

position of having an absolute surge in passenger numbers until now.

English and Welsh schools have now broken up.

A lot of families setting off and unfortunately, well, they fell at the first hurdle.

And of course, there's all kinds of blame going on. I was just

absolutely stunned when I saw just before 8 o'clock or so this statement from the Port of Dover,

absolutely deploring the way in which the French police of frontier, the frontier police, the people who check your passments,

had woefully under-resourced the facilities there.

And Porto Dover has spent a lot of money expanding the space for those border control kiosks.

And the French say, oh, we were only an hour late after an incident in the tunnel.

The tunnel is saying, what? We didn't have any incidents. What are you talking about? Anyway,

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