Excitement on the train to Paris

Three silly santas - us with cousin Isabel

Goodbye to Amersfoort and the cousins. 

Today we caught a train from Amersfoort back to Amsterdam to get the fast Thalys train to Paris. 

Driving rain and much colder today, so a perfect day for travelling (although don’t see much out the windows).

The train to Amsterdam was standing room only as this is the first day after two days holiday – lucky we haven’t done much shopping yet and both bags are well under 20kgs.

There is free wifi on the Dutch intercity trains, and on this train too – what a shame the Aussie trains can’t provide the same service. 

They even have a power point for every seat so for charging our gadgets and computers.

Carrot balls for dinner! 

At the recommendation (partly because of price) of our wonderful travel agent Bryan Wye we travelled 2nd class to Paris. The seats were large and comfortable and plenty of leg room for us tall people. 

The train was really full – obviously Paris at New Year is a big drawcard for tourists.

Mr Jax said he knew when we crossed into Belgium as there were no bike tracks beside the roads. 

He cheekily added that if we were still in the Netherlands, all the fence posts would be the same size (neat!).

 

Then, an hour and a half into our journey we came to a stop. 

There was a bomb scare in Antwerp station (our next scheduled stop). 

We had to backtrack to a small country station where we sat for the next two hours 20 mins. 

It could have been much worse, as if it had been on our train, we would have had to get off and stand in the horizontal rain and freezing wind.

Paris at last, 5pm – only 2 ½ hours late and dark. Of course being Friday night now, the taxi queue was huge.

Here are some photos from Amersfoort before we head out to the Paris streets for dinner.

Not the green man to walk across the road
A green woman!!

Some more Christmas decorations - if you click on the photos you can see a larger version: