Sometime last year I decided to take my niece to france (le touquet) as I promised I would a while back. Like most pilots I checked the weather in advance bbc, sky , metoffice. It was a sunday and everthing was going to be ok so i thought. I got to school and did all the usual paperwork and took off from stapleford. Everything was fine until we got to Ashford there was a huge cake of cloud believe it or not down to 1100 ft. I agonised over turning back and it just got worse. So I decended to cloud base flew visually to dover tracked the Vor out to cap griz nez. You will like to know I crossed the chanel at 1000ft! Fortunately i had done a couple of lessons in IMC which helped a lot. The viz over the chanell despite decending was no more than 500ft. Thankfully there were a lot of other brits crossing in the same situation and lille was quite helpfull. When we touched down she had no clue how scared I was as it turned out There were a couple of other guys there who said they've made the same silly mistake. Lesson always call and double check the weather as ridiculous as it may sound. Needless to say coming back was easier as cloud this time around stopped mid chanell and she fell asleep as soon as we took off.