Satellite
Show on map
  • Day 1

    There is always a surprise

    August 23, 2023 in the Netherlands ⋅ ☀️ 19 °C

    At the time that I should have been very close to Saint Jean Pied de Port, I'm posting this to write a little about the delays of today while I'm in the TGV in the Tours area
    In the morning everything seemed to go well but when I arrived in Utrecht there was a message saying the train wouldn't go further to Rotterdam.
    This is where the trouble started. The friendly but not very useful employees of the NS said the best thing was to wait for the Thalys there in Utrecht.
    So me and some fellow travelers waited about 50 minutes for the Thalys to arrive. This train would skip Rotterdam and go straight to Paris. The train arrived but the doors were kept shut and a minute or two later it departed. Left us stranded.
    The advice we were given was to go from Utrecht to Den Bosch, and from there to Breda and take the Thalys to Paris there.
    If the experts say so, it was probably the best to do. It turned out that the best advice they could have given was to go from Utrecht to Schiphol because it took a while to get to Breda and there the train didn't arrive either.
    So best plan seemed to be go to Brussels and rebook the ticket. Well the train to Brussel didn't go to the final station, so I departed in Antwerp. There luckily I was able to get the Thalys to Paris. But now I had already a 2 hour delay.
    In Paris I needed to go another train station for the next train. There they helped me with a new ticket but only to Bayonne. And that's the train in sitting in right now. I won't make it to Saint Jean Pied de Port today. I'll arrive probably around 22:30.
    And to be honest, I'm pretty tired at the moment. Tomorrow probably will take the first train towards Saint Jean PdP. What a journey already.
    Read more