Having arrived in Amsterdam Centraal onboard a Eurostar service from London, the next stage of this Dutch adventure was to make my way to the city of Utrecht where I was staying. With numerous services connecting the two cities, I had decided to travel on a slightly rarer one, an International ICE.
It had been a while since I had to catch a Thameslink service as I was travelling before the first LNER, but back in October I was at the station in time for the 0419 to head into London. With Thameslink dropping me off at St Pancras, I had just two escalators to climb before reaching the next point on my journey, Eurostar’s check-in.
With a rare spare Saturday available to us, we decided to venture out for the day and, with cheap LNER tickets available, a trip to Leeds was decided on. Whilst Leeds is a city I’ve travelled to by train numerous times, I’ve never actually stepped outside the station and so was excited to see what Yorkshire’s largest city had to offer.
With our two weeks holiday pretty much at an end, the final day was met with an early start and a drive back across northern France. From our base in Normandy, it was about a four hour drive back to the Port of Calais, and with extra time for traffic and delays at border control, we set off about eight hours before our booked Ferry crossing.
Whilst Normandy has plenty of destinations for day trips, our location in the west of the region meant we were not far from the border with Brittany and only an hour or so from the Breton capital, Rennes. Deciding to take a day to explore the city, we made a relatively early start and drove to the outskirts, planning on heading into the centre using the city’s metro.
Well, if we’re honest, my first impressions of SNCF’s Transport Express Régional (TER) weren’t great. The morning of our planned trip to Paris, I woke up to an email (in French of course) from SNCF advising me that owing to our train taking a diversionary route, we would have to take a rail replacement bus to the next station.
Flights & Times 