la vie française: London

Hello everyone!

So we have been gone for about two and a half weeks and are on our way to being settled. Our apartment is a cute little one bedroom in Anglet, about 5 minutes from the beach. We stopped over in London for four days on our way here. We flew in the day after "London's worst snowstorm in 18 years" so it was freezing, but very beautiful. It cleared up when we arrived so we were able to get around without any problems.

We then took two trains to France, both of which we almost missed. First, the chunnel (tunnel under the channel) to Paris, which took about 2 hours, and then another train from Paris to Biarritz. We got to the London St. Pancras station about an hour and a half early to make sure we made our train. After waiting for about an hour for our platform to be posted we figured out that we actually had to go through this whole security check-in (like an airport) before boarding. When we go through security they, of course, decide to tear apart one of Elliott's bags. So... his stuff is flying everywhere, we have 8 minutes to make our train, and I'm crying because I know we aren't going to make it (which the not-so-nice lady going through our bags affirms) ....which means we'll miss the next train & everything will be messed up and cost a fortune. Somehow we managed to put Elliott's bag back together, sprint up to the platform, and make the train at the last minute.

We had about two hours to transfer train stations in Paris and still almost missed our train (both stations at opposite ends of Paris, of course). We had to send Elliott's surfboards ahead to Paris and pick them up at Gare du Nord before transferring to Gare Montparnasse. We arrived at Montparnasse about 20 minutes before our train was supposed to leave. Everything was in french, we were pushing our luggage on carts that were locked because we didn't have time to pay for them, and once we finally made it to our platform the train people looked at Elliott, pointed at his surfboards and said "no". Haha, it was pretty funny. Somehow we managed to get everything on board, nothing was taken, and 5 1/2 hours later we were in Biarritz. Memorable to say the least....

Green Park...