In my last post, I told you all about my time at Thermes de Spa, the original spa – well, the current spa in the town Spa that gave all spas their name. I wish I could get three or four posts out of this weekend but it’s not really worth doing an itinerary post when it’s “Friday, train to Spa. Saturday, at spa. Sunday, train home from Spa”. But I think the journey to Spa is worth a post in itself.
First things first. This was supposed to be a “you’re not doing enough with your weekends!!” train adventure – and I suppose it achieved that. I went to Spa and I went on the train and I was back in time to be at work on Monday morning as if nothing had happened. But this one absolutely got the balance of travel and time in the destination wrong. Taking a full day to get somewhere and a full day to get back is fine… if you’ve got more than 1 day there when you arrive. As it was, I just went a really long way for a spa day.
It’s also fine if the travel is exciting enough to be an adventure in its own right but it wasn’t really that. Saying that, part of the reason it took so long isn’t so much that it’s a long way as that I allowed a lot of time for trains to be late, and therefore had a lot of waiting time. Friday in particular could have been done in half the time.
I started by taking the train from Southampton Airport to London. Southampton isn’t my closest station by a long way but I find it’s the most efficient way to get the train to London, what with the balance of driving distance vs train speed. At four o’clock in the morning, it’s an hour door to door, from my front door to the door of the airport but my train was at 9:09am, which means I’m driving to Southampton in rush hour. I wanted to be aiming to arrive by 8:30am so I had time to pay for parking and get on the station without feeling rushed, and allowing forty minutes for slow traffic but somewhere along the way, I managed to leave home at 6:36am, was walking onto the platform by 7:39am and that meant before I’d even started, I had an hour and a half to kill.
The train to London takes about an hour and twenty, so got into Waterloo just before 10:30am for a Eurostar at 14:04 and although you need to get to St Pancras an hour and a half before the train, that still left a certain amount of time to kill in London. I had second breakfast at the Wetherspoons hiding under Waterloo, popped up to Girlguiding CHQ to pick up a couple of badges for my Brownies, my Rangers and especially for me, and then went up to St Pancras, more or less on the dot of 12:00, which meant a lot of time for standing around at St Pancras where there’s nowhere to sit until you get through check-in, security and passport control. Check-in is fine – just scan your ticket on the turnstile. Security is slow because no one pushes the trays down while they’re picking up their stuff and so the new stuff can’t get through. Passport control is fine, although you have to do it twice, once for leaving the UK and again for entering the EU. Then you have to find a seat crammed into a room that doesn’t have nearly enough seats and I can only imagine how busy it would be if the train immediately before yours isn’t cancelled.
The train journey to Brussels was fine. I had a window seat but the fold-down tables are far too big and there isn’t enough room to breathe if you’re anything other than stick-thin, which wasn’t very comfortable. But the Eurostar is otherwise a smooth and comfortable journey. I appreciate the amount of leg room, I like that we’re not required to wear seatbelts, that we can get up and walk around, go down to the cafe and so on. I like trains far more than planes.
At Brussels, I’d allowed myself nearly an hour and a half to find my onwards train – time to get my bearings (which took longer than I expected; having left the Eurostar platforms by a different exit to the one I used last summer on my way to Poland) and pop into the little mini supermarket. I was planning to be on the 18:28 to Pepinster but half an hour after arriving, with far too much luggage, I decided I didn’t want to sit around for another hour and looked for an earlier onward train, which I found in the form of the 17:56 to Verviers. Verviers is one stop on from Pepinster and both are on the line down to Spa. My plan was to come back on Sunday via Verviers so this was a perfectly legitimate route. The only trouble was that there aren’t many trains to Spa and the one I’d be connecting to at Verviers was exactly the same one I’d planned to get on at Pepinster, so it’s a matter of switching my half-hour wait from Brussels to Verviers to arrive at Spa at exactly the same time.
I nearly didn’t get on the train. As I waited on the platform, approximately 10% of Belgium’s 65,000 Scouts and 25,000 Guides appeared on the platform. Way too many kids and teenagers to be squished on a train with. But when the train arrived, it was massive and a double-decker and I realised that if I hurried to the front of the train, the Scouts and Guides would all be in the middle and I’d be well away from them. Didn’t work out like that. I got two minutes of peace and space in my upstairs seat in the front carriage and then a group of Belgian Cubs, Louveteaux, arrived, with luggage bigger than they were, and sat down in every available seat, with the luggage piled wherever it could, including on top of me. The three sharing my little four-seat area weren’t too bad. They shared a bag of Haribo and then James, the one sitting next to me, produced a Snickers each and later, they all tried out their torches. Opposite was a little delight in tights under shorts called Adam who didn’t sit still the entire hour’s journey to Liège. At one point, he even crawled under the seat and the poor leaders (none of whom looked old enough to be in charge of this mob) spent the entire journey telling him to sit down. Ten minutes before their departure, they all gathered up their luggage and headed for the door and one of the ones sitting with me said “Au revoir, madame”. He’d been ever so polite – greeted me as they all sat down, put a finger on my Kindle for a moment and then realised he shouldn’t and apologised and bless him, at least he wasn’t Adam. I was glad to have the peace and the space back for the last twenty minutes to Verviers.
From there, I had my wait of half an hour for the little local train that would putter up the valley, via Pepinster, to Spa. This one didn’t have any screens or announcements so it was on me to watch my phone and make sure I got off in the right place. Spa, small place as it is, actually has two stations. The second one is borderline closer to where I wanted to be but the first one was the one I’d looked at on Google Maps. I knew exactly where to go once I got off the train.
So that was my journey to Spa. A utilitarian journey rather than a thrilling one.
On the way back, there was a rail replacement bus between Spa and Verviers. I wasn’t entirely surprised – I’d been more surprised on Friday to have an actual train for that leg. It scuppered my plans, though. Google Maps told me to get off at Pepinster, take the train to Liège and then another to Brussels. And when I went to get on the bus at Spa, half the bus was occupied by Scouts! Bigger ones, this time, probably Pioneers or Rovers, definitely the older end of the teenagers. It was good to get to see the route up the autumnal valley in daylight but it was raining and there were so many of us on the bus that the big windscreen kept misting up.
At Pepinster, job one was to find the station, since the rail replacement bus just dropped off on the main road near-ish to the station. Then a wait of half an hour for a local train quite similar to the one I’d been on on Friday which took me to Liège which has quite a big, modern station. Google Maps wanted me to get on the ICE 16 here but the signs over the platform said I needed to have a specific ICE ticket, which I didn’t. Belgian train tickets are generally from one destination to another, with no restrictions on times or services but this appears to be the one except. So I took the intercity from the next platform – alongside yet another group of Scouts. That worked well – it was continuing to Ostende, it was wide and smooth and comfortable and had folding seats and power points and the Scouts remained halfway down the train while I sat in my own seat towards the front. Very nice.
I got to Brussels by about 2pm, I think. My Eurostar wasn’t due until 18:02, so even accounting for needing an hour or two to check in and get through security and passport control, I had quite a while to wait at Brussels. Fine. I shopped for Belgian chocolate to smooth a mentoring meeting I had with a new Brownie leader a couple of days later, I got some lunch and I finished my mini bath book about the pools I tried out in Iceland over the summer. Well, I finished the last three chapters – all of which were started and abandoned – on the train and I wrote the epilogue at the station. It needs a lot of editing before it’s fit even for the first printing that I do when I want to take a coloured pen to it, but at least there’s something in existence to edit. Oh, and another group of Scouts (the same group as Friday’s on the train, judging by the neckerchief but the younger age section) were holding a closing ceremony after whatever adventure they’d had over the weekend while parents waited to take them away. Was this just a special weekend for Belgian Scouts and Guides or are they always this active? Guess I’ve got to go back to Belgium to find out if it happens again.
Getting through the admin for the Eurostar was easy enough, except that no one takes their tray away from security, which means all the ones after it back up. Having gone through the metal detector, I took it upon myself to clear away at least six empty trays which meant our scanner could get flowing again. Then I took a seat and waited. The one thing mystifying me a bit was where the train was actually going to be. There was no visible platform, nor way to get onto a platform, nor even any signs saying “platforms this way” so I was quite surprised, 20 minutes before departure, to be ushered back into and through duty free, which conceals escalators up to the trains. I hadn’t thought about my seat until a week before the trip so I was stuck with an aisle seat but at least it was part of four seats around a table, with room to breathe. Even better, no one took the other three seats. I knew they would, otherwise I’d have been able to change my seat booking but they didn’t come along until Lille.
At which point I learned a sharp lesson about what age it becomes a good idea to subject children to the long travel days involved in getting to and from Disneyland Paris and the two children sharing my seat area were too young for it. They were just tired and grumpy and hideous, the mum was exhausted and the dad lived up to the internet’s man-hating reputation by spending the entire journey with his headphones in, refusing to let the fractious child borrow his phone to distract him with photos even for ten minutes. Fortunately, they were travelling with at least one grandparent and she took on the older of the two, which at least meant the battle over the extending table got curtailed within ten minutes – the older wanted it folded out, the younger wanted to slam it shut and within thirty seconds, I wanted to do a violence. Even better, they still had another train journey of two and a half hours home when they got to London! No, those kids needed an early night and then for the journey home to be done in daylight on Monday morning. If you haven’t got time for that extra day, you haven’t got time to take kids that young to Disneyland. It’s too much for them.
At St Pancras, I was at the underground within three minutes of the train’s due arrival time. I didn’t look at what time I actually jumped off the Eurostar but it was the second the door beeped to allow me to open it. Google Maps had told me it was a straight journey of 21 minutes to Waterloo but it’s on the opposite branch of the Northern line and in fact, it requires me to walk to Euston first. So I got on the Northern line at St Pancras and switched to the Jubilee at London Bridge and that worked pretty smoothly. 25 minutes after Eurostar arrival, I was striding across Waterloo for a cheese panini at Wetherspoons and then I had half an hour to sit around before I could board the train back to Southampton.
Sunday wasn’t too bad for waiting. I don’t think I’d want it any tighter in London, not if I wanted any food. I didn’t need to be at Brussels anywhere near so early but it had been raining in Spa, I had luggage and there isn’t actually all that much to look at on a Sunday morning. If I’d left Spa at a proper hour, I’d have had quite a comfortable journey with fairly minimal waiting times. I’d only really had to wait long enough at Liège to figure out what train I was getting on without feeling rushed and stressed and the wait at Pepinster was due more to it being a Sunday with engineering works than anything else. I think they have a few more trains through that station normally.
But overall, that was pretty much two full days of train travel for one day at a spa and while I’m glad to have crossed another Great European Spa Town off my list, maybe that wasn’t the optimum way to do it.
I Am A Polar Bear 