Ok, so if we keep writing these at the current rate, we’ll probably never get through them. So here’s the next couple of days, where make it to London, Cambridge, Paris, & Switzerland!
We got up and had the breakfast that Katie mentioned a few posts ago, and got all packed up. Packing things back in our packs seemed much harder the second time, but somehow we got everything back in them.
We walked down the the local Sainsbury’s (which we found out was a grocery store) to get a box of tea for a friend of mine who moved from England 15 years ago.
This is one of my dream cars — a Land Rover Defender. They had a lot of them in Europe, but they are all old & expensive here.
We headed over to the train station to get our tickets to Cambridge. Fortunately the train wasn’t as busy as it was a couple of days before when we were there last.
Once we got out of the city, the countryside was beautiful, and reminded me very much of Kansas in places.
Once in Cambridge, we got lost looking for our hotel. We walked the wrong way for about a half mile until we realized we went the wrong way, turned back around, and found the hotel about a block past the train station where we started
After we got settled in the hotel, we walked back down into the city center, stopping along the way to have a bit of lunch at a little French cafe. Further into the city center, we were met with buildings that were hundreds of years old with winding streets.
We wandered through the amazingly beautiful architecture & eventually found our way to a small river where people were punting.
We saw quite a few amateur punters fall off the boat into the water, as well as quite a few traffic jams, like the one above.
We made it back through the streets and window shopped for a while until we made it out to the main park and just relaxed for a while. And then we got hungry again, and we set out to find a traditional English meal.
I had a Steak & Guinness pie with mashed potatoes & peas, while Katie had Sussex sausage, mashed potatoes, peas, and all wrapped in Yorkshire pudding (yummm…).
We headed back to the hotel & watched a bit of television before turning in a bit early.
The next morning (our 1 year anniv!) we packed up and headed for a Baptist church down near the city center for service. We enjoyed seeing what church is like halfway across the world.
We headed back to the train station & back to London. The trip back seemed much shorter than the trip to Cambridge. Once we got back, we found our hotel, which I had booked. It was the most contemporary and chic, although arguably the most expensive. We walked around some more, since this was a part of London we hadn’t explored yet. We ended up finding a Starbucks and decided to sit and people watch for a while. There weren’t a lot of little coffee shops open on a Sunday, so we took what we could get.
It was at this point we found that we needed reservations for our train from Paris to Zurich the next day, so we headed back to the train station to procure them. The lady said that we couldn’t get them there, but we could near Piccadilly Circus, but they were closed on Sundays. So we went back to the hotel a bit stressed, hoping we could get the tickets in Paris the next day when we got there.
Finding Top Gear on the television raised our spirits a bit.
We went out looking for dinner that night, but without wanting to exchange more money, we had to have dinner for less that 20 pounds. All the restaurants we were going to be clocking in just at that, without anything to drink. So we settled with making our own from the local 7-11 type store.
We had bread, cheese, ham, bananas, a beer, hummus, and Reese’s for less about 12 pounds, giving us 8 left for the next day. We ate back at the hotel & turned in early again, to get up for our early train.
The next morning we got up at made it to the train station by 7:30, sped through the security and onto the EuroStar Chunnel train!
It was a beautiful train ride (I did look, I promise!), and super fast. Going under the channel was much quicker than we thought it would be.
Once we got into Paris, we ran to the train station a few blocks away only to find that all trains to Zurich were booked for the day. But if we left from a train station a couple of miles south at 5pm, we would make it into Zurich by 11pm. This stressed us out again, because we weren’t going to be able to make the last train from Zurich to Chur, which left Zurich at 10pm.
So we e-mailed our Chur hotel from outside of a McDonalds in Paris on my PDA hoping they wouldn’t charge us, and headed to the train station. We picked up a bit of lunch along the way, and got REALLY tired of carrying around our backpacks at this point.
Long story short, we made it to Zurich that night, thinking we would sleep in the train station. Once there, though, we nixed this idea and just walked a few blocks. God was watching out for us, and we happened to walk the right way towards some hotels, and found a nice 2 star hotel for about $200 (which, given the facts that we were just a couple blocks away from the river & the most expensive street in the world, not making a reservation in advance, and getting a double room, was pretty decent).
Here we are!
We were VERY glad to be in a hotel for the night (it was almost midnight at this point) and after a little bit of laundry in the sink, we turned in, only to discover in the morning that we had made it to the most beautiful country!
