Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 77: A “tight” 1998 European summer (San Fermin & the French Alps).
The whole point of convening in the French Alps was to recover from nine frenetic days at the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona. Our friends’ pristine Alpine idyll proved effective, and departing Les Gets was drama-free. Henrik gave us a lift to nearby Cluses, where the train schedules efficiently guided us back to Lyon, and this time awake, we made a quick change to Paris.
Don and I did not tarry in the French capital, proceeding immediately to Gare du Nord and the exclusive “Eurostar” station nested inside it. I was excited, because as improbable as it might seem in retrospect, my first official visit to the United Kingdom was in the offing — via the Chunnel (English Channel tunnel), no less.
Surely owing to contrarian exceptionalism long predating Brexit, the United Kingdom never opted into the Eurailpass in spite of belonging to the European Union. Consequently, I’d always chosen to opt out from the UK, skipping the country entirely apart from a couple of hours on the tarmac at Stansted in 1987, a fluke of a stopover necessitated by foul weather in route to Brussels.
We were allowed off the plane to mill around, although it wasn’t possible to access the terminal; regrettably, the joys of cask-conditioned Fuller’s and Marmite would have to wait eleven more years. Evidently I had more important travel priorities than paying rail fares point to point, which is a shame, as it gradually dawned on me that I’d been an anglophile all along.
Meanwhile centuries of subterranean speculation came to fruition in 1994, when the Chunnel opened for transit following six years of digging. At the time, I was vaguely aware that the new cross-channel trains, as marketed with the Eurostar designation, offered selling points of high speed, proximity to city centers, and lower or equivalent costs when compared with flying.
However, I was unprepared for the segregation (by destination) of the Eurostar platforms at Gare du Nord and the sleek luxuriousness of the plasticized rail carriages themselves.
Boarding the train from Paris to London felt like being at an airport, with the railcar interiors substituting for airplanes. It dawned on me that we were witnessing the onset of an era of rail...Read more
