Karen's Blog about her move to Bulgaria

Archive for the ‘Leaving Home’ Category

Leaving Home

LEAVING HOME

 

 

The sale of the house was completed on Thursday 13th August as we exchanged contacts, and our buyers wanted to move in on Friday.  We couldn’t get a van until Saturday, so we arranged to stay in the house on Friday night to be out by 1pm on Saturday.  Ferry was booked for 6pm in Dover.

Karl (elder son) and van arrived at 9am which gave us 4 hours to load everything.  Mark (middle son) came to help with the loading. We were packed and ready to leave at 12.55 and just as we were going to set off our buyers arrived.

We had always been working on volume rather than weight when calculating the space we would have in a van.

Everything went in O.K. but the van was so heavy that it was about 4 inches from the road and as it was a low loader type it looked even worse than it was.  We had to go to Marks and drop off the two leather sofas.

Left Morley West Yorkshire with just enough time to make the 6pm Ferry.

Made good time and decided not to stop for a rest, just get to Dover.

We started seeing the Dover Ferry signs and we were only 23 miles away when we were pulled over by a WPC. From the Kent Police Force.

‘You are a long way from home’ she said sarcastically.  ‘Not as far as we are going to be very soon’ we thought.  We thought wrong.  The WPC had been patrolling the motorway looking for vehicles which looked as though they may be overloaded, and she spotted us. 

We had to follow her to a weigh bridge which was about 20 miles away.  ‘We could have been at the docks by now’ we were saying to each other.

As suspected, the van was over weight.  The WPC said that she would empound the van and we could not move until the van and it’s contents including ourselves weighed less than 3.5 tons.  (I nearly weigh that on my own!!)

She asked us to follow her to a nearby Hotel, saying that she could have left us at the weigh bridge if she felt so inclined.  So – we followed her for miles to a Premier Inn Hotel car park.  She said not to move from there until the van was the legal weight.

By now we had missed the Ferry, and it was getting dark and cold. 

We went to see if we could book a room at the Hotel but they were fully booked.  We told the WPC this and she just shrugged her shoulders and said it was not her problem.

Ron started to unload the van into the Hotel car park, and the WPC said ‘You can’t put your stiff on the car park, the local Council will prosecute you if you do that’.

What were we to do? We couldn’t move the van until we off loaded some weight and we were not allowed to take anything out of the van because the car park was private property and we were not allowed to leave it there.

With that the WPC left presumably to go home for her supper and to bed, leaving us stranded in a car park with no toilet, no light, no food and totally fed up to say the least.

Fortunately, the Hotel staff were more understanding.  They let us stay in the car park over night.  We had to take lots of our things out of the van so that we could sleep in it.

By this time it was 9pm and we thought that we had taken enough weight off the van to be within the legal limits, so we called the Police to ask them for a re weigh.

They arrived at 11pm and escorted us to the weigh bridge again, leaving our furniture personal belongings etc. In the Hotel car park. 

We were just over weight, and the Police man and woman (different ones this time) were more helpful, and said just take a few more kilos off ang arrange for a re weigh in the morning.  They told us of another Hotel about 10 miles away, but we couldn’t go there for the night leaving our van and all our belongings on the car park at the premier Inn.

There was nothing else to do but all 3 of us sleep in the van until daylight.

Next morning we woke at 6am cold and stiff with most of our stuff still on the carpark. Most of it by now wet with condensation and bits of it broken from being taken in and out of the van so mant times.

Sunday morning is not a good time to attempt to arrange anything.

We had many thoughts at this time.  We could:-

1. Ask someone to hire a van and drive down to Dover.  Expensive and would take at least 7 hours.

2. We could ask a local hire company to loan us a van and try to arrange storage.  Again expensive and time consuming supposing we could even get a hire van at short notice on a Sunday.

Both these options would mean that our posessions would be somewhere in England and we would be in Bulgaria.

We are not planning to drive back again overland for quite some time, so storing our things in England seemed expensive and pointless.

The only way that we could shed the excess weight ang get on out way was to dump a lot of our things.

The only problem with that was that we couldn’t get a skip hire to come out on a Sunday.

Here again the Hotel staff came to uor rescue and said that if we paid for a skip to be delivered on the Monday morning thet would load it with our things and it was O.K. to leave the stuff in the Hotel car park until the skip came.  We paid the Hotel Chefs to put the things into the skip when it arrived.

The staff at the Hotel were horrified at the way we had been treated by the Police.  We were just abandoned in a dark car park all night without any thought to our wellbeing.  We could have been diabetic or had other medical conditions, but they appeared not to have ay concerns for our health – physical or emotional.

The Hotel Manager, bless her, offered us a room which had been used but not serviced yet so that we could use the bathroom.  She supplied towels and coffee in the room for no charge.  We were so grateful to have some sense of normality after a stressful night discussing ways around our situation, and always coming back to the inevitable – dump our things in Dover.

Now came the task of deciding which of our prized possessions we could bear to leave behind to go to into the skip. 

This was heartbreaking and also humiliating with people looking on in curiosity and sympathy.

We managed to give away the BBQ, lawn mower, garden hose and reel, bike, sofa and some books.

All Ron’s tools which were heavy and most of my clothes, wellie boots, books, a bed and lots of kitchen equipment had to go.

Due to stress anxiety and lack of sleep I feel that we made some rash decisions, and now we are in our lovely house in Malina in Bulgaria, we say ‘why didn’t we dump this particular item and rescue something more useful instead’.  All too easy to say in hindsight, especially as I left my box of underwear and if I had been thinking clearly I would have thrown out some crockery and brought the box of undies instead.  I arrived here with one pair of knickers to my name!!  I have bought some since in case you are wondering (Too much information J)

Still, I dread to think of strangers going through all our personal items like that after we left.

Many times since we have been in Bulgaria, Ron has begun to do a job only to realise that his electric drill or saw or whatever is somewhere in Dover.

We rang the Police again at 7am and they arrived at 10am to take us once more to the dreaded weigh bridge.

This time we were the correct weight and we were allowed to go on condition that we did not return to the Hotel and try to rescue some of our possessions. 

The van was weighed without myself and Karl, so we would have been overweight still had we all been in the van.

Karl and I got a taxi to the docks (which cost £50!) where we met up with Ron who drove there alone just in case the Police stopped him again.  We definitely did not want to go through the weigh procedure again, but now we were worried in case we were weighed getting onto the Ferry.  We had brought with us some photographs and photo albums that I just could not bring myself to leave behind, and later I found that Karl had added a few things to his case for me. 

Got onto the Ferry at 4pm.  Heaved a sigh of relief until Karl said that he had left his driving licence at home.  To make matters worse he had also left his Sat Nav behind in Dover.  He was going to need this for his return journey back through Europe.

Worse, when we were half way across the channel, Karl discovered that his mobile phone was not enabled for calls outside the U.K.

Just when you think that it can’t get any worse……………….

We just said that we would carry on now and deal with problems as they present themselves.  So our road journey to Bulgaria began.