rootless

We took the train from Portsmouth to London.  We had worked out a strategy as to how we were going to move our immense quantity of luggage and not leave any piece unattended because if you did, one of two things would happen; 1) the Taliban would put a bomb in it to explode at a very inconvenient time and/or 2) The British army would snatch it as quickly as possible to prevent the Taliban from putting a bomb in it, but in case they were too late, the army was ordered to explode all unattended luggage, as they could not be sure about what had a bomb in it and what did not.  In either case, your underwear was going to be in shreds.  This is something to avoid.   Fortunately, one of us could guard the underwear while the other ran recognizance on where to go and how many stairs there were to negotiate.  The plan worked pretty well and we successfully got all our underwear to London.

We were only going to get to spend one day in London to site see.  Not long, but better than nothing.  We checked into, you guessed it, the Hyde Park DAYS INN!  It wasn’t the Queen Mary, but it wasn’t too bad, even though it was the most expensive room we had had on the entire trip.  We had stayed in smaller rooms and in fact, it probably had the nicest bathroom we’d seen all summer, including the ship.  We were only going to be there two nights, so the price splurge was palatable.

I had been dying to see the British Museum so we headed there in the morning.  It was drizzling, we were looking for an address that went around a “square” rather than straight down the street, the sky was gray and cloudy, the subway/tube was fast and efficient.  Yep - we were in good old London and we were both very happy.

The museum was spectacular.  Centuries of British imperialism’s spoils of war reside in this museum.  Take a look.

right:  The once open court yard of the museum has been covered so visitors can meander dryly on rainy days

left:  Rosetta Stone

 

 

 

 

   Hey - where is this guy’s underwear!  (another victim of the Taliban?)

 

 

 

 

 

 

If it wasn’t enough to go through this massive museum, we had also wanted to pack in the Churchill Museum and the Cabinet War Rooms .

We were not allowed to take photos in the Churchill Museum so you have to trust me when I say, “WOW”  This is one of the best jobs of informational interpretation I have ever seen and now I am pretty sure I know more about Winston Churchill than his own mother did.   It is a “must” if you ever get to London. 

The Cabinet War Rooms are photographable.  These are the underground rooms actually used during WWII as the operational center for the British armed services.  They recently had been developed into a museum for the public.  This is what we saw.

below:  After a weak spot was discovered in this portion of the underground rooms, the entire area was filled in with concrete and then bored out into a passageway

 

After being at museums all day, we headed back to our hotel via Hyde Park

 

Then finding a neighborhood market to buy a snack (at these prices we are sure to loose weight) we return to the Days Inn and turn on the “telly” to watch the evening news and organize the cargo (luggage) for tomorrow’s trip on the Eurostar through the Chunnel.  Neither of us had thought about it all day, but it was 9/11.  The news was full of an accident in the Chunnel; a fire.

I have to say, I  am proud of how calm we both were.  We looked at each other and immediately started to discuss what we should do next.  While the news was solely about the fire and what the reporters were able to sort out as to the cause and impact, they made it sound as if it weren’t terribly serious.  Since we were to leave in the morning, we decided we could postpone one day and let people who had be detained today with more urgent need go ahead of us.  So we called the front desk and they had no problem with letting us stay another day.  Then we called hotels.com and they were able to refund us one day of our Paris hotel.  It would cost us a little more to stay another day in London, but we would go to the train station the next morning and volunteer to take a later train.   After that we could do a little more site seeing and it all would work to our advantage.  We went to bed feeling pretty good about what we had been able to arrange at the last minute.

The next morning we get up and flip on the T.V. while we’re getting ready to go to the train station and exchange our tickets.  The fire is still burning and while it is “under-control” no one can say when it will be put out.  Additionally, XL Britain the 3^rd largest airline-vacation packager in the UK, had gone bankrupt late the night before stranding 30,000 plus passengers abroad with over 200,000 tickets sold for the near future.

Off to the train station, St. Pancras (neither of us can seem to remember this name and we consistently call it Saint Pancreas) as fast as we can to get our (by the way extremely expensive), train tickets exchanged.

There are HUGE lines at the British Rail ticket windows, but only a few small crowds of people at the Eurostar windows.  We head for what seems to be the main area.  A small crowd, maybe 20-30 people have gathered around an young French man standing on a chair.  He is telling the crowd, in French, “there are no tickets being sold; there are no exchanges; there is only complete refund.  Nothing else.”  I understand what he says, I think.

The crowd understands and they don’t like it.  They yell at him.  One man is obviously deriding this young man in French words I don’t understand as yet.  It is not a happy scene.

After the crowd got done yelling back at this young man, we verified the information, thanked him for the information and got a copy of the hand-out he was giving to the loudest of the screaming people.It was a list of ferry companies running out of Dover, the last station before the English Channel.  This explains the huge line at the Brit Rail ticket booths.  Everyone is getting a Brit Rail ticket to Dover and then the ferry to Calais.  We went back to the hotel to try to figure out our options.The news about the bankruptcy of XL now overrode the new about the Chunnel fire and any Chunnel news there was, was slow and sparse. So we decided to go see Westminster Abbey.   Probably the smartest thing we could have done, after all we did have a room for that night.

A few more gratuitous London Photos

Parliament and some of her guards

When we returned to the room that evening, the situations at the airports and train stations had escalated and it seemed like we were being held hostage on the old British Isle along with a zillion other people.  We knew we would need to get creative if we were going to make our great escape.Remember all the luggage previously mentioned.  Some of  those pieces weigh almost 70 lbs each.  This just about rules out an air retreat, besides you probably couldn’t buy a plane ticket for love or money at that point.   Pretty much the same is true for train tickets as travelers from the continent scramble to get back home from England after their XL or Chunnel tickets prove to be worthless.   Also, the Dover ferries are packed unless you want to swim along behind. No Thanks.

 So we get out the Europe Travel Planning map and see several ferry routes from Southampton (where the Queen Mary II docked 3 days ago) and nearby Portsmouth to various points on the NW French coast. We were even able to find a buy-a-ferry-ticket-website.  OK, we can get across the water. Now how do we get from Caen France to Paris France? There is a website for Eurail, but they want you to book several days prior to travel so they can mail the tickets to you OR you can go to the Service Centre by Piccadilly Circus and get

 

Will our heroes ever escape the island?  For the exciting answer…. 

tickets on the spot.  Another website showing the train schedule and seat availability indicated there were several seats available on trains in the afternoon.  So if we took a ferry in the morning for 5 hours, we could get on a train and be in Paris about 8:30pm.Since the ferry left Portsmouth, 87 miles south of London, at 8:45am and we had maybe over 200 pounds of luggage and train tickets in London were more valuable than truffles, we decided to see how much a taxi would cost (gulp – the only other option was to run out into the street in front of one of the very few mini-vans driving around London and offer the driver 3 wishes or all the money we had – Ron thought this was an unreasonable idea, perhaps not as unreasonable as renting a car and trying to drive in London, but still pretty unreasonable).We called taxi company one (remember this is now Saturday and business offices in England are not open as much as they are in the U.S.) and get a taped message, “We are not available to answer the telephone at the moment….”. We call taxi company two, no answer, no tape, just ring- ring- ring.  We call taxi company three; no ring – it just goes dead.  We re-try all these with no avail.  We go through several other numbers without any better luck.  Finally, we call a taxi site-seeing tour office.  Geoffrey answers. Ron explains our situation; burning Chunnel, early ferry, more luggage then god etc.  Geoffrey says he will call us back in ten minutes; he promises.(Imagine the Jeopardy Game Show music in the background) We wait for the phone to ring.  We talk about how we will never hear from Geoffrey.  We speculate on the kind of person Geoffrey must be; did he have a Christian up-bringing?  Did he still adhere to those principles?  Perhaps Geoffrey was just passing by when the phone rang and he answered it on a lark with no intention of calling us back; in fact he probably hadn’t even written down our phone number.  More than likely Geoffrey was a Satan worshipping communist who purposely ran from one unattended ringing phone to another merely telling the people on the other end whatever they wanted to hear just to give them false hope.  His name probably wasn’t even Geoffrey and we were positive he would never call back.The phone rang.It was GEOFFREY!  He had called his friend, Martin who was willing to get up in the middle of the night to give us a ride to Portsmouth for more money than I am willing to admit (there goes the trip to Egypt).  Whew!  We love Geoffrey; we tell him we love him.  The time and cost is all arranged, we even have Martin’s cell phone number just in case Martin turns out to be a Satan worshipping communist who has been up all night answering phones and therefore over sleeps; we can call to wake him up.We buy the Ferry tickets on-line and head out for Piccadilly to get the train tickets for Caen to Paris feeling very clever at having devised such a cunning plan.  While all of England is heading for Dover and Calais, the basic route of the burning Chunnel; we shuffle, jive and head in the opposite direction. Pretty good for fat ‘ol Mericans – huh!The very nice, competent, young French women at the EuRail office searches and searches for two seats on the same train.  She explains that everyone has bought ferry and then train tickets to get to Paris as the Chunnel service is interrupted and XL airlines has gone bankrupt.  (Quelle Surprise! Translation: No shit Sherlock.)  Weren’t THEY very clever to have figured that out!  Finally she succeeds, we won’t be able to sit together, but we are on the same train.  We take the seats.We get back to the Days Inn, call Paris and tell them we won’t make it again Saturday night, but will be there on Sunday. We feel pretty lucky, in fact, as we watch the telly seeing hundreds – thousands of people camping in the airports and wondering how to get home, not to mention how to get their money back from a bankrupt company.We pack our 200 pounds of luggage and get to bed early so we have time to wake the Satanist Commie, Martin, in time to take us on the longest taxi ride of our lives.  I dream of croissants and striped shirts. Ron dreams of D-Day and taking the beach at Normandy.  Our hopes and dreams, thanks to the marvelous Geoffrey, may very well come true when we wake.  OR ???

Posted on September 26th, 2008 by dianagene
Filed under: Europe Trip