16th January 2008

After breakfast we gather our luggage, which seems to be getting heavier every day, and cab it down to the train station to catch the 10.15am TGV into Paris arriving at 11.00am.

The Eurostar leaves at 1.00pm and shortly after our departure we are served champagne followed by a three course lunch.  The train makes a stop first at Lille, then at Calais before darkness engulfs the carriage and you just know you are some 40 – 50 metres below the surface of the English Channel.  It’s only for 21 minutes but I always find it quite disconcerting. After a 2 ½ hour journey we finally pull into St Pancras station which has opened recently and taken over from Waterloo.  We have now hit London, and picked up an hour in the process, and our London cabbie finally delivers us to the B&B Belgravia through the most horrendous traffic costing 30 pound!  (If we think about the conversion to Aussie dollars we could have bought a one plane ticket from Brisbane to Sydney!)

The B&B Belgravia is fairly basic compared to what we have been used to, but at least it’s clean.

Tonight we went to see “Billy Elliot the Musical”.  It was sensational! There were some really powerful performances and the young fellow playing Billy was fabulous.