Today we woke up bright and early and I thought it was Saturday.  You know that feeling first thing in the morning when you try to orient yourself and you say, wait, what day is it?  What do I have going on today? And on Mondays you want to cry, and on Fridays you want to burst into tears of joy?  I was in that place.  I knew something was up, and then I remembered, we were going to Paris today! Woohoo! Our first European trip with the kids!

We packed and got everything ready.  Todd was still working in the morning from home, so he told me he had to be on a conference call on the way to the train station. We called a car service that had a car that could fit us all and all our stuff, and left our flat at about 11:30 to catch our 12:35 Eurostar train to Paris. Todd got on his conference call and so I was trying to quiet the boys down in the car.  As soon as we got to the St. Pancras train station, utter chaos ensued. It was to put it lightly, a mad house.  There were people EVERYWHERE, sitting on their suitcases, on their mobiles (yes I've reverted back to saying mobile), and running here and there.  I looked at Todd like, is this normal? He was talking very seriously to the person on the other end of the phone so I knew he couldn't really focus and it was all up to me baby!

So somehow we got our three boys, us, 5 suitcases, a pack n play, 3 backpacks, and a toddler carry backpack into the train station. We go inside and find that it is even more of a crazyland and I am like, what. the. heeeeck?  We had heard it was so delightful to take the Eurostar to Paris, and by the looks around us, this wasn't easy or delightful! We didn't even know where to walk or go because of all the people.

So finally we hear an announcement on the loud speaker that says, "sorry about the inconvenience, all the trains to Paris are way behind schedule, there has been an incident on the tracks."  I look at Todd like, "oh no what are we going to do?!" And he still can't talk to me or help me do anything cause he is on a bloody conference call!

So I find a Eurostar employee and ask her what happened, and how long the delay is.  She tells me that somebody jumped on the track in France and it has delayed the trains by at least 2-3 hours. I was like, okaaaaay.  How do we know when our train is going to leave?  And she told me that she didn't know. Nice.

So right there and then with Todd on the conference call, the boys whining and asking what was going on, Tate starting to get fussy because he was getting tired, I made an executive decision.  I grabbed the boys, and all our stuff and we went outside and literally shoved all our stuff plus our family of five into a small black Taxi.  The Taxi driver thought I was crazy.  And I kinda was.  I was done.  I was not going to wait around this ridiculousness for 2-3 plus hours.  Todd had no clue what was going on as he was engrossed in his call, but he was going along for the ride and helping to carry bags. It was pure insanity.

When we got home we unloaded and went inside.  First thing I did was put Tate down for a nap.  Then I canceled our dinner reservations that night in Paris.  Then Todd got off his phone call.  After talking about what was up he called Eurostar and they were still clueless as ever (how do these people run a successful business?!) And told us we could either head back to the station in 2-3 hours to try our luck, or we can change our tickets for another day.  Since we couldn't change our tickets since we have all our travel meticulously planned out, we opted to stay home for a few hours and then head back later.

All I have to say is I am SO glad we didn't wait around!  Tate got a good nap, Todd and I caught up on some American TV, the boys played nicely in their room.  After a few hours we once again loaded everything back into a taxi, and headed back to the station.  When we arrived we saw this...


 Ayyyy!  So after a few minutes what we gathered from serious lack of information is that it was basically first come first serve to get on a train.  No rhyme, reason, nothing.  Thanks for that Eurostar! So we got in "line" and were waiting. We coincidentally were in back of three cute ladies from Texas. We bonded over the craziness of it all. Then by some random grace we were through and had seat assignments and were off!  We were supposed to leave at 12:35 and we left at 4:45.  All in all stressful, but at least we were onboard the train!

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