Early morning and long day. Cleaned up the apartment and left by 6:45. Got to the local train that took us to Gare De Nord. Found the EuroStar platforms and went through UK security pretty easily. But, I only realized there might be a problem when I look at our tickets.
They apparently forgot 2 coaches and had to move everyone around. They put Ellea and Avery on coach 18, and me and Lindsey on coach 16. Seems like a bad plan to me. I was told to go back up to the stand thingy 15 minutes prior to departure to check for any no-shows. They gave me new tickets so I texted Lindsey to move to a coach that didn’t exist. That didn’t go over well. Eventually, we have ended up on the same coach, in the same aisle, but we had to hang out between coaches for a while so they could move people a round to find room for us.
I truly do not understand how we could be moved to a coach with passengers checked in that doesn’t actually exist. This company makes revenue by selling seats on trains. You’d think they can figure out how to do that well.
I had originally booked a set of 4 seats together at a table in coach 12 because of research I had done on getting from a Eurostar in London arriving in St. Pancras to a LNER train out of King’s Cross. I gave us 30 minutes to get from one train to the other. That was barely enough time. By 2 minutes technically. They were shutting doors as we were running down the platform.
At that point everything went pretty smoothly, except we needed to kick people out of our seats. They had a good reason though, they “have a big family.” Maybe that’d be a good reason to book earlier, so you get the seats you want. Didn’t really help me with EuroStar though.
Once we got to Edinburgh, we found a nice park for the kids to play in and Lindsey stayed with the kids there. I took a tram to the airport and another bus just a bit further to pick up the campervan. The agent locked the keys in the van while showing me how everything worked and had to break open the side window to get back in I guess they don’t have spare keys.
Oh, then someone decided to empty their crap onto the drain nearby. That was gross.
Then, I had to drive this giant van back to pick up Lindsey and the kids in the middle of Edinburgh…on the left side of the road. It’s amazing how much more stressful driving is when you are on the left side of the road instead.
Once I picked up Lindsey, we headed to our campground, Mortonhall, on the south side of Edinburgh. The onsite restaurant stopped serving food at 8:00, so we had to take the van out one more time to find a restaurant, which wasn’t too hard, and quite delicious. One wet get back to camp, we’re set up our beds and fell asleep.
