Eurostar - Friday 10 July 2009

Oh happy day! We’ve found a left luggage place on the internet to store our luggage and this morning we took our two overflow bags to the nice man to mind for us while we are in the UK for four weeks. What a relief! The place looked a bit dodgy to me and the guy said he takes the bags to his apartment where he has a spare room...hmmm… well we may never see our bags or money again but yet again, I guess you have to have some trust sometimes. We’re down to two big cases with all our clothes and toiletries, the kids’ spiderman and tinkerbell bags and my handbag and video camera bag.

Our overnight hotel near the Gare was excellent €145 including a great breakfast, beds were comfy, the room was big and it was a pleasant stay. We’ve booked in there again on the way back and got a cheaper rate on the internet this time.

At 11am we checked out of the hotel and walked around to the Gare to get the Eurostar to London St Pancras. There was hundreds of people already there queuing for the trains. Check in was painless except for the woman yelling at me to stop videoing. I didn’t think it was any big deal. Then when we were getting our passports stamped, the man in British border control was firing all these questions at me so rapidly I started to get abit nervous and we had to open one of our suitcases because they wanted to check something they’d noticed on the xray. It was all abit embarrassing having your suitcase opened and gone through. Eventually got through all the checks and had a breezy trip to London.

We arrived at St Pancras at 2.30 pm. The Eurostar was excellent. It took 2.5 hours from Paris Gare du Nord to London St Pancras with two stops on the way. We walked around to Euston Station where we had to collect the hire car. It took us a while to find the Avis office because we didn’t have the address. We thought we would be able to see the office when we were standing in front of the station.

Anyway finally got everything organised and headed off down the M40 heading towards Wales and ended up pulling up not much before Oxford where we stayed at a motorway hotel for ₤65. You wouldn’t believe how busy this place was. Where were all these people coming from and where were they going?