After checking in, I went into London to meet my uncle and checked out the British Museum for the rest of the day.
Despite the necessary early start, I still had time for hotel breakfast. HGIs outside of the US still offer breakfast as a welcome amenity for Gold elites. As an expert on limited service hotel breakfasts, this was solid one in my expert opinion. A full English breakfast was offered buffet style.
I ate quickly, checked out, and then navigated the maze to the Underground.
You can’t beat going to from Heathrow to Central London for a few quid, and it takes about the same time as a cab. Plus, you might make a few friends on the way.
A little over an hour later, I linked up with my uncle at Kings Cross station, and we walked over to St. Pancras for our Eurostar train to Paris. Check in and immigration were a breeze, and we waited in the holding pen for about 30 minutes.
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Our Business Class tickets were a very reasonable $140 each. I selected a pair seats with a table.
The train left bang on time wizzing through London. A light lunch was served as the train accelerated thought through the English countryside. It was fine.
After lunch, we relaxed for a couple of hours. I really enjoyed Eurostar when Mrs. D4L and I did the reverse route to London for our engagement trip. It was just as pleasant and comfortable as I remembered.
I’m infamous for tight scheduling, but this might be worst offense. Yet. Our train from London was scheduled to arrival at Gare du Nord at 2:12pm, and the train to Caen departs Gare St. Lazare at 2:59pm. Google (aka our AI overlord) said it take just 8 minutes by RER from Gare Du Nord to St. Lazare. So I figured we had plenty of time to transfer.
The first snag was our train from London arriving at Gare du Nord 10 minutes late.
Snag number two was the RER itself. We had to navigate the maze of Gare du Nord to find the RER station, which took way more time and effort than I expected. Tickets were also an issue. While I was able get a ticket on the app, my uncle couldn’t. We tried several times to avail while on the Eurostar. So we resorted to waiting in line for a kiosk to buy him a ticket. With that finally secure, we headed down to platform to catch the train.
Two stops later, we hopped off at Haussmann and hiked up several massive flights of stairs (with our massive bags in tow) to get to street level. And then we raced a few blocks over to Gare St. Lazare.
About a month prior to the trip, a friend mentioned to me that he was thinking about going to Spain at the same time as our Normandy. I convinced him to pop over to France first and join us on the Normandy jaunt. He met us the station, and we made our way over the platform.
I got us First Class seats on this train, which was just a slightly bigger seat. Not an iota of service. But it was fine for this relatively short two hour ride.
When we arrived in rainy Caen, we hailed a Bolt to take us to our AirBnB. Finding a spot to stay in Caen was a challenge. None of my usual chains had properties in Caen, and none of the independent hotels were particularly enticing. After my friend joined, I started looking for a short term rental as it would be more cost effective and comfortable for the three of us. We ended settling on a large AirBnB near the Saint Sauveur square, which was about 10 minutes from the train station. It was definitely not the lap of luxury, but it was roomy, comfortable, and well located.
After settling in, we walked over to the square. We wanted to eat early as we would have a long day of exploring the next day. The only restaurant open at 6pm was a tapas restaurant, which did quite nicely.
Tapas went down nicely with a few bottles of wine, and we toasted to finally arriving in Normandy!