This is the terminal at Newhaven. It's a bit sleepy. The lane-divider thingy in the foreground was bumped out of line in 1983 and nobody ever straightened it out. When I went into the hall to buy a ticket about 3½ hours before sailing, there was one person ahead of me at the counter and three people behind the counter, all seemingly working hard to extrude a ticket for this fellow. After 20 minutes of peering at monitors, shaking heads, sliding across to look into another computer, one of them looked up and said "Birth Certificates please". Customer had come down from south London to pick up his tickets a day before his voyage because he didn't trust them to be able to produce them on the same day as his sailing. Silly man hadn't phoned ahead. If he had, they would have — might have — told him that tickets aren't issued without proof of age and identity of all the holders. Back to London, mister. "The computers are a bit slow today, sir"  

Easier for me. I had my passport, of course. But wait..   another story... Had a laugh later with the guy form London afterward. <Back Next>