This morning we disembarked early from Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas and walked in the rain to Amsterdam Centraal Station marking an end to the first phase of our 2024 summer adventure. It’s been forty-seven nights since we departed Brooklyn aboard the Norwegian Pearl on April 25th and we’ve visited nine countries over that timespan. It’s been glorious. Now we’re headed to London for an extended stay. Knowing that there are currently no direct trains from Amsterdam to London and that we’d have less than the recommended time for making our connection in Brussels, we unsuccessfully attempted to catch an earlier train. The first leg of this journey was aboard a ruby red train, part of the formerly Thalys network which has just recently merged with Eurostar and apparently is oft referred to as Red Eurostar. We did manage to make it through the passport checks at Brussels-Midi and now we’re on Blue Eurostar heading for England and a nearly six week stay mostly at La Gaffe in the Hampstead neighborhood of London. One of the joys of Blue Eurostar is the food and drink perks of the Standard Premier fare package that we treated ourselves to. As we’ve savored a delicious light meal, water, tea, and wine, we have been zooming along at 180 mph. We’ve traveled The Chunnel and arrived at St Pancras Station. Then took a ride on the London Underground before settling in at La Gaffe. It feels like home! One of the first things we intend to do here is lighten our load. We plan to ship the cold weather gear that we needed in Iceland and Norway and everything else we think we can live without back to the states. Hopefully when we leave London we’ll do so with only one carry-on suitcase per person. But for now we’re back in familiar territory. First we’ll relax then we’ll continue the London and environs exploration we started last summer before returning to the U.S. aboard Queen Mary 2 arriving on July 27th.
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