OK, so let’s get to Nice and get the TGV from there.
TGV tickets from Nice to Paris were selling for a couple of hundred €uros but there were only some tickets left on the last train tomorrow departing at 4pm and when I tried to buy them there was a problem with the last page.
I wasn’t prepared to give in at this stage to an overnight in Nice… From my point of view I felt that if I ever stopped moving I was going to get stuck. By hook or by crook I had to keep going.
Connecting to the news informed me that Gordon Brown had sent Ark Royal to Calais. Whether this was to actually ferry people home or to threaten French dock workers with a severe response to any wildcat strike action I was never sure.
It was at Tirana airport that I started chatting to other Brits who were on their way home too. This was helpful because it really started to bring home to me the sense of scale of what was happening. While 3000 people a day were being stranded in Sydney, I was now getting closer to the bottleneck of the English Channel, on which perhaps several hundred thousand people had set their sights.
Everyone had their different plan of a route to the UK. Everyone had their slightly different bit of info about why everyone else’s route wouldn’t work.
For example I stupidly thought I could just book onto Eurostar and to prove my point I could see that Eurostar was still selling tickets. “Oh that has been on the news” said someone. The website isn’t taking bookings when you get to the payment page because there is a 4 day queue at the terminal in Paris.
“That’s why I’m going on to Brussels” chimed in someone else. Noone is reporting delays from Zeebrugge. “That’s because the roads around Belgian ports are so clogged no camera crews can even get there” asserted someone else. Everyone was looking for the magic route through but it became clear that there probably wasn’t one.
It did confirm for me that if the ports were clogged with four day queues than I just had to get in line as quickly as I could. Even if airspace did reopen at this point, without a ticket on any carrier in Europe I’d be waiting a long time for any flight.
With all of this whirling around my head I got on board the Al Italia flight to Rome. It was one of those weird tremendously narrow Al Italia planes that involves boarding through a ramp in the plane’s backside. Slomebody's idea of the futuristic in 1957!
I took my seat, looking forward to a nice sandwich and a bottle of water. I was so tired however that I fell asleep immediately, slept through take off and knew nothing of the journey until I was awoken by the ’10 minutes to landing’ warning. I looked out of the window to take in the sight of St Peter’s Square and the Colloseum.
I had arrived in Rome five hours ahead of the direct flight that had 'sold out'. Mehmet had gone a great job!
TGV tickets from Nice to Paris were selling for a couple of hundred €uros but there were only some tickets left on the last train tomorrow departing at 4pm and when I tried to buy them there was a problem with the last page.
I wasn’t prepared to give in at this stage to an overnight in Nice… From my point of view I felt that if I ever stopped moving I was going to get stuck. By hook or by crook I had to keep going.
Connecting to the news informed me that Gordon Brown had sent Ark Royal to Calais. Whether this was to actually ferry people home or to threaten French dock workers with a severe response to any wildcat strike action I was never sure.
It was at Tirana airport that I started chatting to other Brits who were on their way home too. This was helpful because it really started to bring home to me the sense of scale of what was happening. While 3000 people a day were being stranded in Sydney, I was now getting closer to the bottleneck of the English Channel, on which perhaps several hundred thousand people had set their sights.
Everyone had their different plan of a route to the UK. Everyone had their slightly different bit of info about why everyone else’s route wouldn’t work.
For example I stupidly thought I could just book onto Eurostar and to prove my point I could see that Eurostar was still selling tickets. “Oh that has been on the news” said someone. The website isn’t taking bookings when you get to the payment page because there is a 4 day queue at the terminal in Paris.
“That’s why I’m going on to Brussels” chimed in someone else. Noone is reporting delays from Zeebrugge. “That’s because the roads around Belgian ports are so clogged no camera crews can even get there” asserted someone else. Everyone was looking for the magic route through but it became clear that there probably wasn’t one.
It did confirm for me that if the ports were clogged with four day queues than I just had to get in line as quickly as I could. Even if airspace did reopen at this point, without a ticket on any carrier in Europe I’d be waiting a long time for any flight.
With all of this whirling around my head I got on board the Al Italia flight to Rome. It was one of those weird tremendously narrow Al Italia planes that involves boarding through a ramp in the plane’s backside. Slomebody's idea of the futuristic in 1957!
I took my seat, looking forward to a nice sandwich and a bottle of water. I was so tired however that I fell asleep immediately, slept through take off and knew nothing of the journey until I was awoken by the ’10 minutes to landing’ warning. I looked out of the window to take in the sight of St Peter’s Square and the Colloseum.
I had arrived in Rome five hours ahead of the direct flight that had 'sold out'. Mehmet had gone a great job!
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