Today has been a day of solid traveling.
1. hotel to Amiens train station via bus
2. Amiens to Lille-Flanders via train
3. Lille-Flanders to London via Eurostar Rail
4. London to Heathrow Airport via underground
5. London to Dubai via plane.
It’s overcast, foggy and freezing today. Visibility out of the train window is poor but the scenery us still interesting, in a different way. Villages and farms dominate the view but splattered across the French landscape are huge piles of sugarbeets and military cemeteries. The cemeteries are everywhere, easily identified by their whiteness against the dirt background. They literally take up space amongst the crops. I’m not sure what determines where they locate these cemeteries. And have the Germans treated their war dead with as much respect? I don’t know. I will have to find out.
The gloomy visibility plays with the way things appear on the landscape. Huge power-line towers stand arms out like scarecrows, in lines that dissolve into the gloom. Wind turbines silently spin in the misty halflight doing their bit for the energy needs of Europe. Cows look like cows. I change trains at Lille-Flanders and board Eurostar for London.
Eurostar is a high-speed train service that services most of Europe I think. It’s a beautiful smooth ride and the wheels don’t scream against the track, they sing. It’s fast! The scenery is a blur now. And without fanfare or warning it races into a tunnel. The next bit of light we see is England. The thought of being under the English Channel played on the nerves for a while and I was keeping an eye out for leaks but no problem. It was easy!
angusmccoll 