Welcome to our European vacation – something to keep you amused over the Christmas break.
At the end of October, Sue and I embarked on our first long holiday together for ages. When I say holiday – it was largely a work trip as she (to the greater extent) and I had some research we needed to do for upcoming books and travel features.
The trip was to take us to Paris, en route for Berlin, then to London, Southampton, Glasgow, London again, Avignon, Paris and Saigon before returning home. This was all intended to be done as sustainably as possible, by taking trains wherever they were available.
In terms of what was intended, and what eventually occurred, it was an unmitigated disaster. The intention was to fly to Paris Charles De Gaulle – no way of avoiding a flight if you want to go to Europe – then take a train into Paris, then from Paris to Berlin, including a sleeper.
The next train would take us from Berlin to Brussels to catch the Eurostar under the Channel to London. We’d then take the train to Southampton, for reasons I’ll explain later, then somehow take the train to Scotland, then another back to London.
From London, we’d take the Eurostar to Paris, then the fast train to Avignon, then back to Paris and, after a few days, board a flight to Sydney via Saigon.
For a variety of reasons, almost none of that happened, apart from the flights from and to Sydney.
For a start, sleeper trains do not agree with madame and, after 22 hours of flying from Sydney, she did not relish the idea of a long and sleepless train ride to Berlin, so that became a two-hour flight instead.
Obviously, the train trip from Berlin to London was even less attractive, so that became a flight to Stansted with a quick train ride to London at the end of it. Except the Stansted Express wasn’t running so we had to take a train north to Cambridge and then south to London.
The train ride to Southampton two days later was fast and comfortable. Sue is writing a book about the Duke of Wellington and the university there is where all his papers are held.
Now, I had spent hours trying to schedule trains, via wherever, to get us from Southampton to Glasgow and it was going to take days. Finally, I consulted a travel website and it revealed that there are a couple of fights a day from Southampton Airport to Glasgow. What? Why?
I didn’t even know Southampton had an airport. But a lot of UK-based cruises leave from the city and Scots love a cruise. Once again, the trains lose out.
At this point, I have to say that trains in the UK can be horrendously expensive and often unreliable. One of the biggest mistakes they ever made in the UK was to denationalise this critical element of their infrastructure.
It would be the biggest mistake, but then there’s Brexit – the error of which you don’t fully appreciate until you are in a non-EU passport queue at any immigration desk.
So we flew to Glasgow and, having given up on our sustainability quest, flew to London. Now, this is where it gets embarrassing. The trip to Avignon had been cancelled because Madame has a dear friend from her university days who lives in Limoges and you can guess the rest.
You can also guess that there are flights from London to Limoges that cost very little more than the cost of trains and are a lot less hassle. I also have to confess that I had anticipated that at this stage of our journey we’d be done with queueing so I purchased every fast track option available.
The train from Limoge to Paris was slow but comfortable and the seats had flip-down tables so we could work. But the score of trains versus planes, which should have been 7-2, turned out to be 2-7.
Now, there’s an awful lot more to this than how we got from place to place, but it’s worth noting that we flew business class on Vietnam Airlines for just over $7,000 return, each. That bit, at least, we got right.
Next week, I’ll tell you all about what we did Berlin and why we’d go back there in a heartbeat.
