Hello everyone! Today I will be writing about our trip to France. Actually, the venue of the competition was near the border of Germany in a town called Schiltigheim which forms a single conurbation with much larger Strasbourg. You can think of it as Oldbury and Birmingham, if you like. We were staying less than a mile away from the European Parliament building.
We made plans to drive to that competition since we somehow thought it was close. Spoiler, it is not! Still, much closer than Georgia, for sure 😊. At the time I was on a half-term break anyway, so I didn’t miss out on school for that trip. We left our house on Friday evening and drove to Dover to board a ferry to Calais in France. We took a detour via Germany as my dad wanted to pick up a custom made radio aerial.
The competition was well organised, the sports hall it took place in was a nice, modern building. What made it even more interesting was the fact that there was a weapon control the night before the competition was held – a first one for me, just like in major, senior competitions. In Georgia I was the only fencer representing the UK but in Schiltigheim there were two more girls from England. There were many excellent German fencers, making the standard really high. Overall, I finished 9th but I think I could have done better.
Since the competition took slightly longer than expected, we missed our ferry and had to wait for the next one. The silver lining was that the ferry at 1am was almost totally empty, there was only a handful of cars apart from ours. Usually, those ferries are fully packed.
Me enjoying the ferry back to UK
By the time we got home it was well after 4am on Monday so I only had an hour and a half of sleep before I had to get out of the bed and start preparing for school.
Again, this was an enjoyable trip and the restaurant where we had a meal on Saturday night, Le Boucanier, was very nice, so I would love to come again next year but, maybe by plane? Going back to the title question, yes, there are.
