Au Revoir, Paris! Hello, London!

Tuesday morning (Sept 10) was spent cleaning my aunt and uncle’s apartment and packing bags and journaling. With our final trip to the boulangerie behind us, we nabbed a taxi at the stand across the street and were relieved a large taxi van was already waiting in line. At Gare du Nord we boarded our train to go through the Chunnel (now they call just call it the Eurostar, the name of the train company) to London.

It was a fairly smooth if formal process of going through French customs and then getting questioned by the British border patrol. Surprisingly, the agent was quite thorough in his line of questioning and asked several times about what exactly Dave was doing for his business there and how could we be staying in Scotland for seven weeks. Having jumped through so many hoops to get our visa to stay in the EU for nine months and knowing we’d be leaving Great Britain well inside the 90 days Americans are allowed to visit for, we hadn’t anticipated being grilled about our itinerary. In the end, we were allowed to pass, having sufficiently convince them we weren’t getting paid jobs in the UK or enrolling our kids in school there, I suppose. Not sure if Brexit made them extra suspicious.

 

The train ride was delightful. The boys had a set of four seats facing each other with a table and had fun playing and reading. Christine used the WiFi on the train to catch up a bit on blog posts and Dave read and napped. Adam was super excited, having greatly anticipated “his first real train ride.” We arrived in Saint Pancras Station, right next to King’s Cross, both of which are featured in Harry Potter books and films. What a great way to start our stay in London!

After checking in to our Airbnb (underwhelming place but the cheapest we could find for six people in an expensive city), we walked a few blocks to get fish and chips at a nice restaurant. Quite fun to choose from six different species of fish and we even tried the grilled anchovies! We decided we liked the fried haddock the best.