London Calling?

The French government tourist website has all kinds of groovy stuff on it, and they run scads of different contests. Their latest contest involves the Eurostar, the train that connects London and Paris.

If you want to see a fairly amateurish, but mercifully short video about the Eurostar and enter to win a trip to Paris and London, click here and then go to "become a Paris London Eurostar expert". This is a site that's well worth exploring.

Anyway, here's the deal with the Eurostar: It's a train that takes you from the heart of Paris, under the English Channel and into the heart of London in two hours and fifteen minutes. That's pretty cool and very, very fast. That also means that it would be very possible for anyone who really wanted to see London for a day to leave early on the Eurostar, have a full day of sightseeing in London and still be back in Paris by bedtime or even dinner.

Teri and I have been on a lot of trains together, but only on one of the high speed trains in Europe--the Spanish AVE train between Madrid and Seville, and it was a wonderful way to travel.

If you've never been to London and think you won't get back to Europe any time soon, it might be worth considering a day trip to see the Queen. I just priced out a ticket for the Saturday we'll be in Paris and you can buy a round trip ticket to London that leaves Paris at 7:15 a.m. and gets you into London by 8:30 a.m. You can head back to Paris at 8 p.m., getting you back to Paris at 11:15 p.m. (there's a time zone thing going on, Paris is an hour later than London). The price of that round trip ticket is $103 (Dollars, not Euros).

If you want to do this, I'd book the tickets now, since I noticed that some trains on that day were already fully booked.