So I am no longer a “St-Pancreas virgin” as a fellow traveller in the train referred to it, and it’s frankly really great. It took me a little over 2 hours (or about 40 rows of knitting since that’s what’s making transportation such a breeze these days) to get to Bruxelles and 1h50 minutes to come back! I can’t even get out of London in a car in half that time!
The problem of course with super efficient services everything else starts to pale in comparison and your expectations get skewed.
I was supposed to get to Antwerp for lunchtime on Friday and since it took me 2 hours to cross the Channel and get into Belgium, I figured going to the Netherlands was going to be a breeze… what an idiot!
Turns out it takes about 3 hours both ways and would have cost me about half of the price of my Eurostar ticket. Obviously this was unacceptable and totally unfeasible (It would have meant I would have had to be in Antwerp for a little over 2 hours before turning back to be able to catch my train home), so I had to cancel…
Would I have planned better without the Eurostar? Probably. But I would have ended up taking the less sustainable solution of grabbing a flight back to London… Maybe this is something services like Dopplr can start to address more clearly: managing travel expectations in a world where the diversity in service delivery forces users to make less sustainable decisions.
“You can fly tomorrow and meet Y, and if you’re in town B suggests you go have coffee at Tree & Leaf”.