Eliot's Travels

Jim and I concocted a pretty good scheme for our trip back to Paris Nord train station. We were over by the Louvre and had to pick up our luggage at the hotel in Montparnasse. We ate at a nice cafe by the Musee d'Orsay and splurged the time to have yummy creme brulee and chocolate mousse. We were a little tight on time to catch our Thalys train, so we knew dragging the kids and the stoller in the pouring rain to the hotel and right back wasn't so good.
We all rode the metro to the Montparnasse stop, Jim helped me and the boys get up the stairs to the entrance to the 4 line to the train station and then he booked off to the hotel. The boys and I walked to the platform to wait for Jim. We sat on a yellow bench. Eliot was excited about sitting on the yellow chairs, but there were two homeless people sitting there. They reeked - I mean bad. So we sat down a ways and enjoyed watching five metros come and go. We saw Jim just as one pulled in the station so we jumped on and headed off to Gare du Nord.

We boarded the 5:00 train to Amsterdam after grabbing some sandwiches for later. We set next to a nice family from northern Belgium with two boys. We were in the same cozy cabin as before and it was more relaxing with another family to share it with. We were a little conspicuous before with the only children. The trip was pretty uneventful until we got to Holland. There was an "incident" near Dordrecht that made us get off and switch Thalys trains well south of our ultimate destination - Rotterdam.

The real problem was unclear. We noticed that we moved quite slowly after our stop in Antwerp. The announcer said in Dutch, French, and then English that there was "an incident that required us to switch trains to one waiting for us in Rosendaal." Hundreds of us got off the train with all of our luggage. They told us to take the same seats, but when we got to our seats they were already taken. We would later learn that this train was the 2-hours-earlier train from Paris. They reminded everyone if you were going to Dordrecht or Breda, you should just take local trains. Then they announced (again in Dutch, French, and English) that this train would have to go to Utrecht and then we'd take local trains to our final destination. Everyone groaned on the Dutch version, so I figured it was not good news. They also told us that there was an incident with a boat and a bridge and the tracks through Dordrecht were closed for now. Then after 15 minutes, we were underway. It was so crowded that some people even had to stand. Eliot and Jim were in one seat, me and Miles in the another behind them. The next announcement everyone laughed - and we heard that "this train will be taking it's original route." The people said it was Dutch synicism that made everyone laugh. I thought maybe they had told people that it was going to Utrecht (well out of they way) to try and get people off. Who knows? One gentlemen did say there was a bad accident in Dordrecht, so that part was true.

We pulled into Rotterdam about an hour and a half later than scheduled. The boys did great, but we were very tired when we arrived home. Eliot had carried in his backpack, a stick that he had picked up in Paris. He gave lots of people chuckles for his stick.

posted by Whitney @ 1:05 PM