Sunday, September 27, 2009

27th September: Catching the Eurostar to Paris

Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, Paris and Montmartre
taken the last time I was in Paris from the roof of the Musée d'Orsay

By the time this post publishes this morning, I'll be on the 7.52am Eurostar from St Pancras International Station to Paris Gare du Nord with my sister and niece. Sketching will probably start on the train! I may even twitter - having finally worked out how to do that via my mobile. [Note: My mobile is set to 'send' only]

Paris is one hour ahead of London so by 11.17am we should be arriving at in the busiest station in Europe.

We'll then be walking some fifteen minutes to our hotel in the ninth arondissement - I'll be reporting later on whether I can recommend it. It looks promising and it took an awful lot of browsing of the options before I found it!

After which the sightseeing - and the sketching starts in earnest!

Blogging our French trip

Today, we're starting our trip to France. If you're interested you can take a virtual trip to Paris, Normandy and the Loire valley with us as I've arranged for a post to publish each day on this blog about where we are and what we might be getting up to!

I'm not trying to 'go digital' for the trip so sketches and photos from the trip will be posted when I get back - much in the same way as I've done for previous trips (see Venice, Italy (May 2005); California, Arizona & New Mexico (July 2006); Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont & Maine (September 2006)).

Both sets of posts will include travel tips
as this is a travel blog as much as it's a sketchbook blog.


If you're ever doing this particular crossing of the Channel you might find the following reviews interesting to read:
Tip: I booked over the phone as we were doing two different types of ticket (one return and two one-way) and you can't do different combinations for the same party online. I ended up with two different references for adjacent seats. I was able to print my Eurostar return ticket off using my own printer. However as a mistake was made by the booking people on the other ticket and this was remedied but this then meant that it couldn't then be printed off online and the tickets had to be posted to me - in the middle of an ad hoc postal strike!

Moral of the story - if you book over the phone and discover they have made a mistake, get them to cancel the whole ticket and start again if you want to print off rather than wait for the post!
Two important points to note:
  • Please do comment - but it's unlikely your comment will be published until I have the time and can also get access to a trustworthy computer to moderate comments - which might not be until I get home again!
  • I'll be tweeting during the trip - but only those who have signed up to follow me already can see those tweets as I've protected my Twitter stream for the duration of the trip. Sorry to be boring (and this is not an exercise in trying to collect followers) but I'm just trying to minimise the incidence of 'weird' people following me because I'll be tweeting about popular places.
Links:

No comments:

Post a Comment

PLEASE NOTE:
I always check identities and ALL links in comments for spam.

Due to excessive attempts to introduce spam via comments on this blog, I've introduced a regime where all comments with links in the ID or text to the websites of hotels/resorts/tourist destinations will NOT be approved and are deleted. The websites of repeat spammers are also reported to Google.

Nice, sensible people who are not new to blogging probably don't need to read my Comments Policy