London to Paris - Eurostar train

Tuesday, 17th September

We had a lovely stay in London near Wimbledon with our hosts Annie & Peter. We especially enjoyed Annie's descriptions of visiting Buckingham Palace for a state dinner with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and the time she and Peter stayed overnight at Windsor Castle.  We look forward to visiting Annie & Peter again the next time we are in London.   Annie very kindly drove us and our luggage to the tube station where we made our way to Kings Cross St Pancras to meet up with our Eurostar train to Paris.

Once out of St Pancras International station in London, it doesn't take long for the Eurostar to speed up. There were quite a number of times in the 2hr 15 min journey where we would have been zooming along at around 300 km/h.  It is very quiet, although we didn't expect the very sudden changes in air pressure when entering and especially leaving tunnels in England - our ears needed to "pop" very quickly to relieve the pressure. 

 A chilly arrival in Paris...a cool and windy platform at Paris Gare du Nord...

 The trains are very long, I believe 18 carriages (coaches)

 First challenge was to find the toilets.....eventually, relieved, at a charge of 70 euro cents each, we then had to figure out how to get to our apartment.  Located the Metro ticket office and found our platform...

 ...but when we left the Metro station, Dave mis-read the Google map on his phone and we walked the wrong way and ended up in what appeared to be an African district. So we were lost and then it started to rain heavily - not good.   Well, after fiddling with the map on the phone we finally made it to the apartment, being met by Remy who let us in and explained everything to us.  A very neat little French apartment, not far from Sacre Couer.

 View from our apartment window - Rue Simart...