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Thursday, 27 July, 2017 – weather: OK

Today we leave London to go the Eurostar under the Chunnel to Lille in France. The weather forecast is revolting, supposedly raining heavily on both sides of the channel.

Julie goes out early to her favourite Pain shop and gets a croissant and a coffee and fills it up with smoked salmon from the market yesterday. I have stuff Julie has bought during our stay, turkey, ham, toast. Then it is time to get going. Katerina arrives a bit late and Julie had gotten impatient and drags the suitcases upstairs. We depart and go to Earls Court station one more time, fortunately the rain held off. We get on the train to go to Kings Cross and it is totally packed. Hard to survive with two heavy suitcases.

Eventually the crowd starts thinning out and we make it to Kings Cross Station, quite early. We go through the security and immigration (for Britain and then France) and still have a long wait in the departure hall.

Eventually they announce boarding for our train. This is the only bad part of this kind of trip because there is a massive crush up the ramp escalator. The primary issue is when you get into your carriage is there space for your luggage, and we have some big suitcases. We barely find space for our luggage and then settle into our seats. Other customers have tickets for seats that do not exist but I guess they got that settled out.

Once we got started everything was OK. No obvious Internet, no laptop power at the seats but we are moving. There is one more stop to pick up a few passengers and we are certainly on our way. I get a bit distracted as food and drink starts to arrive, we are in Standard Premium, a tautology it seems to me, but there is a cold lunch.

Decent chicken slices with bread and cold vegies like grilled peppers. Not bad. There is a small bottle of red too

The people that were receiving food ahead of us had a cold quiche instead which I would not have been able to eat. We arrive at Calais and in another 30 minutes reach Lille. After getting into the station, finding out about our next train trips we exit the station expecting to catch a taxi. Censorship of what happened next, suffice to say we finally got into our apartment 75 minutes later after major missteps from us, lugging of suitcases over blue stone and other uneven pathways, our GPS and our Hosts.

Julie in front of the saxaphone player waiting for our connection

The apartment is disappointing in that although there is a lift it only takes us half way up, so there are stairs for Julie to drag suitcases up to reach the apartment. The apartment itself is good, roomy and well featured albeit could have been slightly cleaner.

Oh, I should mention that the weather is actually pretty good considering the forecast had said heavy rain all day. Also another point is that I thought Lille was a small town – actually it is the fourth largest city in France.