Here's a view of inside the Eurostar. It was pretty packed. I thought the train would be larger, like the shinkansen, but it was pretty tight inside.

Here am I on the Eurostar train, headed to Paris. The channel tunnel part only lasted about 20 minutes. It was faster than I expected. It was mostly just dark.

This is the being remodeled St. Pancras station. The Eurostar will leave from here to go to Paris in November, but in the meantime we had to take the Underground to Waterloo station.

I made a mistake on the train journey home. I left my ticket in my pocket and it fell out. Since buying a replacement ticket would cost about 50 pounds (100 dollars), I really didn't want to pay that. I went and talked with the conductor. Since Victoria still had her return ticket and the original receipt (plus the original tickets to our destination), he accepted that I had probably lost it and let me pass without buying the new ticket.


At the station we were leaving, there was a funny Guinness train, but it seemed to mostly be used by the maintenance crews. I wonder if they used it to keep the beer cold while doing their work.


Here is Victoria on the platform. The tracks were very straight as you can see, so they seemed to go off into the distance.

Friday was my birthday, so I took the day off and Victoria and I went to her parents' house for the weekend. We traveled on Thursday evening so we wouldn't have to travel on my birthday. It took about 4 hours to get to Norwich, and then her parents met us at the train station and drove us to their house.

We had a lovely time, and Joyce made us lots of desserts, including a birthday cake. There were five different desserts during our almost three day time there, so I got nice and fat.

On Friday it was cloudy so we mostly relaxed, and went to the nearby town of Holt for a little shopping, but I didn't buy anything. I spent a lot of the weekend taking pictures of the house and nearby cottages. Her parents run a bed and breakfast and rent out several holiday cottages as well. They just got a new computer, so they wanted some images to put on brochures Joyce is making. I was just happy I didn't have to go to work that day.

Saturday the weather was great, so we went for a walk through Sheringham Park, which had many visitors due to the sunny, warm day.

We came home early on Sunday because Victoria needed to do some lesson planning for the week. She got some done on the train, but her laptop battery could only last for the first 1.5 hours of the journey, so it was not as much as she wanted to. I read a book on the train and finished it. It was called Coriander. The book was more of a young adult novel, but I keep reading them because Victoria has to evaluate them for teaching purposes.

We got a Christmas present from her parents which was a hamper of gifts from Spain. It included some bottles of cava, olives, olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes, and chocolates. Her parents spent nearly two months in Spain before Christmas, so it was nice that they brought some stuff back for us. We managed to pack it away in our suitcases and none of it broke, so that was good.

Last night I made blueberry muffins to take into work today. Typically you are supposed to bring some sort of snack or cake in for your birthday. Blueberry muffins are my newest baking adventure. I think carrot cake will probably be next on my list. The muffins went down very well, and I had none left at the end of the day.