Unfortunately it would appear that travel nightmares are a part of any world-travellers stories. We have quite a few but our worst by far would be when we were returning from a long weekend in Brugge...
For my husband's birthday birthday last year, I organised for ourselves and 4 other friends to catch the Eurostar from London to Brugge for the weekend. Unfortunately it was the weekend of a forecast cold snap in Europe. There was some anxiety in the week leading up to our Friday departure, but thankfully our train left almost on time and deposited us in Brugge only an hour behind time. We had an amazingly cold weekend, with beautiful snow and gorgeous scenery.
The dramas began when we all tried to make it back home again. Three of our friends tried to leave the Sunday evening but they were only able to make it as far as the main Eurostar terminal in Brussels. They eventually were offered overnight accommodation and managed to get a train to London early Monday morning.
Because we knew of our friends misadventures, we decided to take an early train to Brussels on Monday morning to make sure that our 7.30pm Eurostar train to London was still running. We arrived at the station around 11am and after making enquiries at the Eurostar terminal we were assured as long as we turned up for our train an hour early we would be fine. We thanked the staff for their advice and spent the next couple of hours exploring Brussels at our leisure.
Our leisure time was cut short when we arrived back at the train station at 5.30pm to discover a horrendous line for the Eurostar terminal. It would appear that more trains had been cancelled during the day and now it was first come first served for any remaining trains. What followed was 5 hours of standing in a freezing line (only those who were far enough down in the line to be able to stand in the Eurostar terminal had any heating) with no information at all.
We did eventually get through the terminal and booked in for the last train of the day by about 11pm. We had to wait for another 3 hours in the Eurostar terminal for our train, but no one was complaining because at least we were finally in heating.
At 2am our train arrived and we all bundle on board for an extending trip back to London. The train itself was running 3 times slower than its normal speed because of the cold temperatures. Thankfully my husband and I slept through most of it, while our friend chatted away to his seat companion.
We thought once we were seated on the train that all the drama was behind us, only to be woken at Ashford station (about 1 hour outside London) and told that something had happened to the train while travelling through the Channel tunnel and it could not take us any further.
Another hour went by, while we waited for a replacement train to come from London to pick us all up. Thankfully they allowed us to remain on the broken down train for as long as possible so as to utlise the heating and when the train eventually pulled up we quickly jumped from one train onto the other.
Finally after one more hour we arrived in London St Pancras, our final destination, around 7 o'clock in the morning. Now all we had to do was navigate the tube in peak hour, to finally, oh finally, reach our nice comfy bed.
It was quite the experience but Eurostar have been very generous with their compensation and we've used them many times before this and since without a problem. Plus there's not much that anyone can do about cold weather, is there??
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