Century 3 day cruise log Captain's log, star date....Oh, no, that's another show. Someone messed up, no doubt about it. We'd set off at about ten pm, Ali and I, with my daughter Angela and her boyfriend Andy taking the back seat and the rest of the car divided equally between clothing and stilettos. We'd planned to stay overnight in a Travel Lodge on the M1, and that was OK. It took us longer than we thought, with our GPS system not really helping that much.

In the morning we had breakfast at about ten thirty, intending to complete the leisurely two hour drive and board the Century in the early afternoon. Alas, 'twas not to be, thanks to an abundance of roadworks (where do they get all those traffic cones from, and why didn't I think to buy stock in the early days?) And a jack knifed truck on the M20. But finally we arrived at Dover and pulled up in a line in sight of the gleaming new Century, with Angela and Andy getting excited because this would be their first cruise and us getting excited because we've Celebrity cruised before. Eventually we reached the front of the line, I dropped off the three passengers and then followed the instructions to our prepaid car park. Roughly translated, the man said "go out the way you came in, turn right at the roundabout, right at the next roundabout and follow the signs for the Hoverspeed terminal." Maybe he should have added, "if it gets dark, you may have gone too far."

So I followed the directions, ending up in a queue for a car park behind other cruisers. Lots of other cruisers. I parked, and was told to join another line for a minibus back to the ship, which I could just about see in the distance. This line must have had 200 people in it. To get us all back to the ship, the Dover Port Authority had put on two minibuses, each with room for 6 passengers, and three taxis. The line was growing quicker than the transport was clearing it.' Read more