Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corder coming to you.

I was going to say live. Well, I'm alive, but this is recorded in my kitchen if the acoustic sounds unusual.

Anyway, I'm in the kitchen and I've got my mug of tea because I have had a bit of a time. I'm not complaining for one minute. It's been

quite interesting over the weekend where I was cycling through the sunlit uplands of Kent.

I really was. It was gorgeous actually. Very early Saturday morning went across from

Folkston on the old Dover Road

until I made contact with the A20 and then just hundreds and hundreds of trucks and some slightly

cheeszed off cab drivers who were hoping to get home for the weekend and who clearly hadn't as well, of course,

as cheezed off passengers who were hoping to get away on holiday.

You will have heard perhaps quite a lot from people who were stuck for many, many hours,

both at Dover and at Foxton. Dover, of course, the main departure point

for continental Europe by Ferry and Fokston, the hub for the Channel Tunnel shuttles run by

Euro Tunnel. And at both of those locations, the frontier controls are so-called juxtaposed so that if you are in Kent, then you go through French passport control before you leave Kent.

And that generally is thought to be a good thing, or that's what it was thought to be.

Just remember that this was a huge conveyor belt operation.

People would bowl down the M20.

They would either turn off for the Euro tunnel or they get onto the A20 and continue

on to Dover and sail over.

And the idea was just get everybody there as swiftly and as smoothly as possible.

And that's actually served us well for years.

It was always clear, as I mentioned on Friday, that it was going to be tricky this weekend because it's the main getaway people tend to leave on

Friday because that's very handy if schools already broken up and you're going to be somewhere

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