Just Chunnel It: Paris to London and on to Brands Hatch

Huh?

I was pretty sad to leave France for Great Britain. My reasons were that we only had a couple more weeks to go on our trip and that we were going to places where we could understand the language, at least if it was written. Growing up in San Antonio, I'm used to being in groups of people who speak a language I really don't understand very well and I find that comforting. You can tune a lot out, sort of like turning off a hearing aid.

Our chunnel tickets from Paris to London put us on the Eurostar train at about noon on Thursday, October 15th, so we had plenty of time to eat breakfast at our hotel in Paris and take the Metro to the Gare du Nord. There we had to go through some serious security, similar to getting on a plane -- plus passport checks.

The train was a fast one and it went through the French countryside for a long time before we went under the English Channel. As 1st class passengers, we got a nice meal and it was a quick and enjoyable ride. The Wikipedia link has some good pictures and the Eurostar link tells a lot about the train service.

We were able to buy some pounds (of course the Brits couldn't use Euros) in the station before we left, so we didn't need to do that in a big rush when we arrived at the Eurostar terminus at St. Pancras train station.

We immediately got transportation passes, a Tube map like this one and a bus map. I couldn't find a good picture of a bus map online and we used ours to smithereens, so you'll have to trust me about that.

Rather than take the Tube to Victoria Station which is near where we stayed, we decided to take the bus. I couldn't resist the double-decker red buses waiting outside the station. It was a bit of a ride, but we got there okay and everyone was helpful along the way even though we were arriving and traveling at rush hour. We used the buses a lot in London.

Our directions said that the hotel was about a 15 minute walk away, so upon our arrival at Victoria, we headed down to the Luna Simone Hotel. If you look it up on TripAdvisor, there are tons of pictures of it that people have taken. I'd made reservations for one night and then for 4 additional nights after we went to Brands Hatch for the weekend. They gave us the same room both times.

This is a picture I got from the pictures people have contributed to TripAdvisor. Although Trout disagrees with me about this, our room was the one on the right with the black wrought iron balcony over the doorway.

Pretty much all of the houses on this street looked the same. As we walked along, we kept losing the address. It turned out that if the house is on a square, the street name is the name of the square and the numbering starts over. And don't count on all the odd numbers and even numbers to be on the same sides of the street, either.

It was a cheap sleep by London standards with a typical English breakfast. Frankly I preferred the skimpier French breakfast to having pork and beans in the morning, but when we returned for the rest of our stay, we were able to get yogurt everyday, so that helped.

The next morning, Friday the 16th, we loaded up our packs again after breakfast and walked back to Victoria Station. Since we couldn't check into our room at Brandshatch Place early, we had plenty of time for me to arrange for the rest of our travel in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It turned out that the best thing for us to do was to buy a Senior Pass. That allowed us to get great discounts on all our British train travel as well as on the ferry that went from Scotland to Northern Ireland.

So why did we go to Brands Hatch? Racing, of course. Every year in mid-October the Formula Ford Festival is held at the Brands Hatch Circuit. Trout's been talking about going there for the past 20+ years, so part of our itinerary planning was for us to be there for that event.

After getting our British train travel set up, we got open round-trip tickets to Longfield, Kent -- the closest train station to our hotel and to the track. Fortunately, a taxi was right there when we arrived (the trains run frequently). We took the taxi to the hotel, checked in (we were still early, but the room was ready) and ate lunch in the bar.

I went back to the room to ease out, watch the telly, read or whatever. Trout put on his pack, took the camera and walked over to the track. After floundering a bit on getting in, he finally made it into the track and got his ticket for the weekend.

I finished my book. It got dark. No Trout. We had dinner reservations at the nice restaurant in the hotel. No Trout. Finally he called and he had gotten himself lost getting back out of the track to walk home. Keep in mind that when he finally got to the road it was narrow, no sidewalk, no shoulder and they were driving on the wrong side! He thought he was so lost that he would be late for dinner, but he actually showed up about 15 minutes after the call. We had a lovely meal with some of the best sorbet/gelato of the whole trip -- green apple.

These are a few select pictures of what he saw there. He sat in the same place for the whole weekend. This is an overview shot.

These are some cars getting ready for the start.

Here they are in the 1st turn.

Here they are coming down the hill opposite the stands.

Of course, he ran into some other Americans on Saturday. In fact on Sunday he was so excited to get back over there that he skipped the hotel's wonderful breakfast.

So what did I do while he was at the track for 2 1/2 days? Not much. The hotel had lousy TV reception, but they did have a lot of DVDs to borrow. Even though the sound was very low on the TV, I watched Gone with the Wind and a couple of other movies and continued to read. I also enjoyed (yes, enjoyed) having the time to catch up on some accounting work relating to the Trip.

He was at the track all day on Sunday and I had to check out of the room at 11:00, so I spent the day in the sitting area of the hotel reading and writing postcards. I had lunch there and waited and waited and waited. I went for a walk in the direction of the track and then came back. As I was coming back a local woman exuding tea cosy nice offered me a ride, but I told her where I was going. I was actually cutting through one of those walking turnstyle thingies that are so common in England. They allow you to cross across public or private lands so as to avoid the aforementioned lack of shoulders.

Finally Trout got back to the hotel, we got a taxi back to the Longfield train station, took the train back to London Victoria, walked back to our hotel and checked back in for the rest of our stay in London.

Our first night in London, Thursday the 15th, we went out to dinner at a traditional English place right around the corner called Chimes. I seemed to have better luck at picking English food than Trout did, but his was passable. We were definitely not in France (or Italy or Spain) anymore.

Sunday night after we checked back in, we tried another recommended place called Grumbles. It was late and we were tired and cranky, especially me. We sat down at a table, got some bread and sparkling water, and all the lights went out. The place was packed. At first it was kind of fun, but then we found out that they couldn't cook anything for us because the power was out. So we left.

We went to Chimes again and their power was also out. We talked to someone on the street and he said that the power was okay on the next street over, and that he had just eaten at the Queen's Arms, so that's where we ended up for another English dinner. This time it wasn't so good as at Chimes, but we managed to eat.

It turned out that the power is so old and flakey in that part of town that some apartments in the same building had power and some didn't. The restaurants had gas for cooking, but they couldn't cook because the exhaust fans were electric, so they had to shut down their kitchens. Maybe Lucas is the Prince of Darkness for public utilities, too.

We did go back to Grumbles later in the week and had a lovely meal there. The manager was very apologetic again and was surprised that we'd returned. I'll include a fun picture from there on a later blog posting.

We did enjoy coming home at night and watching a little TV in English. It was fun to see "Bones" dubbed in German or French but better to see it in English. I do think you can learn a lot about a place based on the TV programs locally produced or available there. You can also pick up on colloquial speech patterns that are charming. One of our favorites was the use of "cloud" in the weather reports to mean cloudy or clouds, as in "there will be lots of cloud today".