Blog2008 ≫ Remember: Eurotunnel is not as good as you think it is going to be

Had a nice weekend in Lille, marred on the way home by a Eurotunnel delay. We were meant to be on the 10pm train home last night, and there was a two hour delay for some reason. No explanation, just an automated message when you are queued up in your car saying "sorry for any inconvenience caused"... oh no, no inconvenience caused at all, I always build a spare couple of hours into my Sunday night plans. We were at the terminal quite a long time in the end, as we'd got there a bit early in the hope we could duck onto an earlier service, and we couldn't. Bah. It should be my dream mode of travel, it runs direct from Folkestone, no flying involved, fast, a lot cheaper than Eurostar (Eurotunnel is the one you drive your car onto, Eurostar is the passenger train), so you can take masses of duty frees, but it has gone wrong at least 50% of the times I've used it.

Lille was nice, lots of designer babywear and home stores. No pubs, or really many vegan friendly places to eat. Our hotel12 was great, we had a suite with free movies and things, good choice Clare, it is the number one rated hotel in Lille3.

We did eat a few places, more of a struggle than I'd thought though even with a French speaker in tow. Pain Quotidien was not as good as it is over here, nice when we got the componenents, but they did not really want to adapt a dish to remove the meat / fish / cheese. Aux Indes4 was good after we got over the initial confusion, they did do a vegetarian set / tasting menu, but they did their best to hide this fact.

Had a big old shop up on the way back, bought much wine and paid too much for it because of the bad exchange rate at the moment, but at least we're stocked up for a few weeks, let's call that a little christmas present for myself.

Was knackered all day yesterday, went to bed early but still don't think I'll be fully rested until the weekend...

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Paul Clarke's blog - I live in Hythe near Folkestone. Wed + dad to 2, I am a full-stack web engineer, and I do js / Node, some ruby, other languages ect ect. I like pubs, parkrun, eating, home automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, family tree stuff, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.