Escape from Europe: Part 2

JD's Perspective:

Saturday April 17

9:00 AM: I awake to an email from Carey saying that the Sunday flight to Chicago has been cancelled. Time to take drastic measures.

9:15 AM: Tiffany leaves her room and heads down the street to the downtown ticket office for Eurostar and Rail Europe. I stay behind to work the web.

9:20 AM: Tiffany calls to say that there are at least 600 people in line. She stays in line.

9:25 AM: Raileurope.co.uk is saying that there is no availability on any train from Paris to Madrid. Hertz.com is saying that there is no availability for any car in Europe for a one way rental from Paris to Madrid. I decide to call the Hertz telephone reservation system. I spend about 35 minutes on hold before speaking to a delightful lady that tells me that although Hertz France has blocked all one way reservations, the UK affiliate has discovered that you can circumvent the hold by booking and paying for a full week. I tell her that we want to do that and get a confirmation number. She tells me that the Hertz location closes at 8 PM Saturday (in Paris) and that I have to pick up the car before then. Really? That’s going to be tough.

10:15 AM: I call Tiffany and tell her that we have a car, but we need a way from London to Paris.

10:20 AM: I start working on www.eurostar.com. It is still showing Saturday availability, but the tickets disappear as soon as I try to book them. Carey is doing the same thing on the internet back in Virginia – same problem. I try to book the 2 PM eurostar – gone. I try to book the 3 PM eurostar – gone. We keep at it for a solid 30 minutes and finally get confirmed on the 8 PM train leaving out of London (the last for the day), arriving in Paris at 11:30 PM. This, obviously, is too late to pick up the car. I call Tiffany and we agree that she should get out of line, since she obviously isn’t going to be able to get a better ticket on Eurostar for Saturday.

11:00 AM: We still need a way to get to Paris before 8 PM. I know that there is a car service that moves cars through the chunnel, and that a car can take up to 9 passengers for the price of the car. So all we need to do is get to the car intake point at Folkestone, chat it up with a friendly British bloke, get him to put us in his car and take us through the chunnel. Easy enough. We also think about the Dover-Calais ferry, but there are news reports about the Ferry port being overwhelmed with passengers, and BritRail has stopped selling the combo train-ferry passes. People are warned not to go the the ferry port without a ferry ticket in hand.

11:05 AM: Tiffany gets on the phone with our travel agency, trying to grab anything and everything out of Madrid. We finally get confirmed on a Sunday American flight into Miami, and a Monday Air Europa flight into Miami. The connecting flights on both Sunday and Monday put us into Reagan airport around midnight on their respective days. One small problem – the Sunday flight is an 11:30 AM departure, which means that we need to be checking into the Madrid airport at 9:30 AM. Everything that we have seen says that Madrid is a 12 hour drive. This would mean picking up the car by 8 PM and driving all night to Madrid. We aren’t happy about this possibility. Neither are our spouses. Tiffany also grabs the next available United flight out of London as a backup, which isn’t until Wednesday the 21st. Really don’t want to be in London on Wednesday the 21st.

11:15 AM: I get a text from a family friend who offers to explore maritime options for crossing the English Channel. I eagerly accept.

11:30 AM: Telephone call from my friend in Charlottesville. We discuss the certainty of success. Thanks to Larry and all others who prayed for our journey.

12:00 PM: We wrap up the call with the travel agent. Tiffany and I head to our rooms, pack and meet in the lobby at 12:30 PM.

1:00 PM: We arrive at St. Pancras train station to catch our train to Folkestone. St. Pancras is also the Eurostar terminus, and the whole place is a zoo. There is also an international ticketing office (for continuing service in Europe) and that line has at least 500 people in it.

1:42 PM: We get on the train to Folkestone. Grab subpar sandwich and snacks on the way. How come the Brits can make a nuclear reactor, but can’t make a cookie that doesn’t taste like lard?

2:15 PM: I get a call from an extremely angry French lady. She is the counter agent from the Hertz location where I have booked the car, and she tells me that the relocation of rental cars out of France is “not permitted right now.” I tell her that they are not permitted on one way rentals of less than one week, and that I am renting the car for a full week. She stews on this for a minute, then tells me that they actually don’t have any cars right now. I doubt this (why wouldn’t you lead with that if it was the case?), and tell her that I want to be contacted the second someone turns a car. She really wants to cancel the reservation, but I plead with her to leave it on the books. She finally agrees, but the call leaves me seriously deflated.

2:50 PM: We arrive at Folkestone West, which turns out to be a tiny rural train station. There is not a cab in sight, and the train conductor had told us that it was too far to walk from the train station to the intake point for the chunnel auto transport intake. I stick out a thumb.

3:00 PM: For some reason, Folkestonians are reluctant to pick up two hitchhking business travellers with large rolling garmet bags and computer cases. Go figure. Finally a nice lady on a bicycle rides by and offers to send a cab from the dispatch stand in the center of town.

3:10 PM: Our Folkestonian cab driver, Warren, arrives and tells us that we basically have no options. He tells us that the chunnel intake lot is a direct exit off of the interstate, and that you can’t get into the lot unless you show a ticket. The entire thing is fenced and barricaded from pedestrian traffic (presumably to prevent precisely the type of stunt I wanted to pull). He said that he would be happy to take us through in his cab, but that his passport was at a friend’s house, and that in any event, he didn’t think that there would be any spots available on the auto transport because of the transportation crisis.

3:15 PM: Warren suggests that we drive down to Dover just on the off chance that we can get on a ferry. The ferry isn’t ideal because it takes 90 minutes instead of the 20 that the chunnel auto transport would take, but we decide to check it out.

3:30 PM: We get to the Dover ferry port. I sprint inside and the place is dead. The ticketing agent says that they had been overrun on Friday, but that once the news announcements went out, and once BritRail stopped selling train-ferry packages, people simply disappeared. There is a ferry leaving at 4:45 PM. I run back outside where Tiffany is sitting in the cab (don’t want to lose Warren – he’s a wealth of knowledge!). Warren tells us that train times from Calais to Paris are at least 3 hours, and sometimes as much at 4.5 hours, depending on how you hit the connections. In other words, once you account for the time change, we won’t be getting to Paris until 10:15 at the earliest, and perhaps as late as 11:45 PM. It is now logistically impossible to get to Paris in time to get the car at 8 PM, which means no Sunday flight out of Madrid. Seriously bummed.

3:35 PM: We are already holding a Eurostar ticket that gets us to Paris at 11:30 PM, so we decide that the laborious travel involved in taking the ferry and multiple trains is simply not worth it. We tell Warren that we need to be back at the Folkestone train station by 3:58 in order to catch the train back to London. Warren does an admirable job of getting us to the train station a full 2 minutes before the train arrives, and even manages to swing by the white cliffs of Dover! Big tip for Warren.

5:15 PM: We arrive back at St. Pancras after what amounts to a worthless 3.5 hour trip to the coast. I am seriously bummed and trying to work on contingencies. I call the UK Hertz reservation number back. The Hertz lady tells me that while local affiliates can change booking rules, once a reservation is in the computer, a local affiliate is duty bound to honor it unless they don’t have the car. I get the impression that the UK Hertz people have a little bit of rivalry with the French Hertz people, and enjoy getting around their booking restictions. I tell the UK reservationist that we’ve had a bit of a hiccup, and won’t be able to pick up the car until Sunday morning. She cheerfully changes the reservation. Meanwhile, Tiffany reserves two hotel rooms in Paris for the night and cancels our Sunday American flights out of Madrid.

6:00 PM: We realize that we are both famished and sit down for supper at a restaurant in St. Pancras. I tell Tiffany that my steak is somewhere between Sizzler and Outback. I am definitely chewing 30 times per bite. The British lady at the next table interjects and tells me that it is a shame to compare the steak I am eating to a Sizzler steak. I am worried about a cultural incident, but it turns out that she lived in Fairfax Corner for nine years and thinks that American beef is far superior to British beef. Actually, it turns out that she thinks America is superior to GB in pretty much every way. This provides a temporary moment of happiness.

7:00 PM: We finish supper and I head out to find car chargers for our cell phones. Neither of us brought car chargers, and we don’t want to be without cells if we actually get a car and are driving for 12+ hours. I ask for directions to the Vodafone store. It is closed when I get there. I ask around, and can’t find any other options in the neighborhood. Is anything going to go right today?

Carey's perspective:

Thankfully, I had already made arrangements for the kids on Saturday, as Barrett and Melissa asked if they could take the kids for a few hours on Saturday morning. (Thank you, thank you, and thank you!) I was obviously exhausted and would not have been able to help JD had they been at the house. Also, on Friday night, I had mentioned to Sarah (not my sis-in-law) that I needed to mow the yard, but I wasn’t sure how I would find the time. Jeff came to rescue on Saturday morning and graciously mowed the yard for me. This was just one of the many times during this ordeal that I said, “Thank you, Lord, for providing wonderful friends.”

I dropped the kids off with Barrett and Melissa and headed home to try to find JD a rental car, so that he could drive from the U.K. to Madrid (or at least from Paris to Madrid). I had no luck. Hertz said they weren’t allowing any cars to leave the U.K. and that there were no rental cars anywhere in Paris. Avis said pretty much the same thing. Meanwhile we both tried to book a Eurostar ticket out of London to Paris. After hitting refresh about a dozen times, JD said, “Okay, I’m on the 8:00 pm out of London.” At the same time, Eurostar had posted a note on the website explaining they were adding more cars to the trains to allow for more passenger travel. Thank you, Lord! Also, during this, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law called to ask if they could pick up the kids for a sleep over at their house. Madelyn and Pierce were so excited to see their cousins, and again, it allowed me to stay on alert in case I needed to help JD. Thanks, Allen and Sarah!

So, JD now had a way out of London. At least he could start heading south. JD also called to tell me that he had somehow found a rental car to get from Paris to Madrid. I was amazed by this because there wasn’t a car to be found. He explained he had to rent the car for a week. Oh, who cares? A bit later he called back to tell me there was some confusion and he might not get the car, and then I felt a bit deflated. Oh well, I thought, at least he’s getting out of London. He told me that he and Tiffany were going to try to get to Paris a bit faster by heading over to Dover to see if they could “hitch a ride on the ferry.” This part was confusing to me, and he didn’t have a long time to explain it because they needed to catch the train to Folkestone. JD called back a couple of hours later to explain they were going to have to take the train to Paris and would not be able to pick up the car, if there was a car to pick up, until Sunday morning.