Lille; Friday, 28 April, 2017

I’d left plenty of time to get up to St Pancras, and to get through the likely crowds trying to use Eurostar on the Friday evening of a Bank Holiday weekend. I was very glad I did as the queues when I reached St Pancras were enormous. Thankfully there were staff from Eurostar trying, despite the best efforts of some of my fellow travellers, to get things organised into queues for the relevant trains.

It took a good 45 minutes to get through checkin and security from the point at which I joined the back of the queue, but given the number of people that wasn’t too bad. It also meant I only had around 20 minutes to wait in the lounge before the train was called for boarding.

Due to a late inbound train we were a couple of minutes late leaving, and because of that we ended up grinding to a halt outside the channel tunnel for a few minutes as another slower train had been let through before us.

By the time we finally pulled into Lille the train was about 15 minutes late and I was considering getting cab to the hotel, but when I emerged from the station there appeared to be two different types of taxi – ones painted black and ones painted white – with the drivers screaming at each other. I decided I probably didn’t want to get into a cab with someone who was just having a road rage incident so instead I decided to walk over to the hotel, which took around 20 minutes.

I checked in, and given the time, headed straight up stairs to bed.