Trains, Trains and Trains

With this entry I will be caught up on the composition of this travel blog, and theoretically our Wifi equipped hotel room in Amsterdam tonight will allow me to post the last several entries I’ve just composed. With any luck I can rig the date on the “Blogger” page so that the entries correspond with when they HAPPENNED rather than when I wrote them. And then won’t YOU feel silly for not having kept up with our journey?!?!?

It’s 11pm and we’re pulling into Rotterdam. Last night it was European Daylight savings time, and today we crossed the channel and lost an hour due to the time zone. That’s two hours we’ve lost in one day, and Jenn and I feel distinctly cheated. It’s a HUGE travel day for us, hopefully our largest on this trip, but not definitely.

Here’s another little travel tip:
DON’T forget that train times that are listed for the week don’t necessarily run on those schedules on SUNDAY. This is especially important when making a train connection to a channel ferry to another train or trains on the continent. We had to do some mad scrambling last night on a pound (ish) per hour (ish) internet hookup at a convenient youth hostel, and that resulted in a one boat, four train, six city, eight station extravaganza which is getting us from London to Amsterdam in a mere ten hours (only 45 minutes to go!). We’re both a bit tired. My own guilt and embarrassment for screwing up the Sunday schedule thing has made me a bit more grumpy and sensitive than I might otherwise be, but we’re both having fun on our London-Dover-Calais-Lille-Brussles-Amsterdam jaunt that was SUPPOSED to be a London-Harwich-Hoek Van Holland-Amsterdam jaunt.
We’re getting used to the Eurail pass, and we were both proud and relieved that my high school French has gotten us through upgrading our Lille-Brussles train to a necessary TGV (translate to “Very Fast Train”) ticket for only 6 Euros. That’s about nine dollars to you and me.
Or at least to you.

More from Amsterdam.
No, probably not.
Probably more from Hamburg.
We’re meeting Hidden Shakespeare there and are very excited for the Clown Reuinion!