Don't let anyone ever tell you that travel is predictable or easy. Just
when you think you have all your plans figured out to go to Bruges,
reality has a way of tossing everything up in the air. Which is to say,
we're not going to Bruges. At all. And you'll just have to cancel your
expectations of all that chocolate you expected me to bring home.
So
what happened? Well, we bought the train tickets yesterday and it was a
tricky schedule--we needed to change trains in Rotterdam and then
change again in Brussels--but we were game. All this for a 1-day
round trip that required 6 hours of travel time total. But what the
heck, that Belgian chocolate was calling.
We showed up at the
train station early enough and found the correct platform, but things
just didn't seem right. We kept hearing an announcement repeated over
and over in Dutch, occasionally in English, about the train to the
airport being cancelled, but it didn't hit us until we both heard the
name Rotterdam. It turns out that there was a big power outage somewhere
that messed up the trains and ours was cancelled. So we trooped down to
the ticket office and stood in line only to be told that we had to take
a train to Utrecht and change here but the agent had no idea what train
we should change to. We instantly decided that things were way too
complicated and that we were gonna give up on Bruges (earlier in the
week we considered staying in Bruges for a few days but the hotels were
all full) so we got a refund.
So what next? We went to the
international train ticket line and bought tickets to Paris, which means that in a
couple of days we'll be spending 2 travel days and 4 full days in Paris.
And then we spent the next 3 hours in our hotel room trying to find a
hotel and book reservations and then trying to decide on which tours we
wanted to take. All totaled, we spent 5 hours not going to Bruges today.
We
were hungry after that and we wanted comfort food so off we went, back
to the pancake place and stuffed ourselves. I'm not going to tell how
many pancakes we ate and I swore the waitress to secrecy after she
recognized us from yesterday, and then I did the Jedi knight trick to
erase her memory. And then it started pouring-- same as yesterday when
we were eating pancakes. What is with this weather, anyway?
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