{"id":716,"date":"2007-11-24T10:53:28","date_gmt":"2007-11-24T17:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/24\/how-i-got-eurostarred\/"},"modified":"2007-11-24T10:53:28","modified_gmt":"2007-11-24T17:53:28","slug":"how-i-got-eurostarred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/how-i-got-eurostarred\/","title":{"rendered":"How I got Eurostarred"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginheight=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/maps.google.co.uk\/maps\/ms?f=l&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp;time=&amp;date=&amp;ttype=&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;near=Washington,+DC,+USA&amp;msa=0&amp;ll=50.837051,4.367612&amp;spn=0.041995,0.027411&amp;om=1&amp;msid=112038852725355223379.00043fafb97ec3664923e&amp;output=embed&amp;s=AARTsJpHXJqDAAwQ9FdqG-wuk7d8Vnddrg\"><\/iframe><br \/><small><a href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.co.uk\/maps\/ms?f=l&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp;time=&amp;date=&amp;ttype=&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;near=Washington,+DC,+USA&amp;msa=0&amp;ll=50.837051,4.367612&amp;spn=0.041995,0.027411&amp;om=1&amp;msid=112038852725355223379.00043fafb97ec3664923e&amp;source=embed\" style=\"color:#0000FF;text-align:left\">View Larger Map<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n<p>So I am no longer a &#8220;St-Pancreas virgin&#8221; as a fellow traveller in the train referred to it, and it&#8217;s frankly really great. It took me a little over 2 hours (or about 40 rows of knitting since that&#8217;s what&#8217;s making transportation such a breeze these days) to get to Bruxelles and 1h50 minutes to come back! I can&#8217;t even get out of London in a car in half that time!<\/p>\n<p>The problem of course with super efficient services everything else starts to pale in comparison and your expectations get skewed.<\/p>\n<p>I was supposed to get to Antwerp for lunchtime on Friday and since it took me 2 hours to cross the Channel and get into Belgium, I figured going to the Netherlands was going to be a breeze&#8230; what an idiot!<br \/>\nTurns out it takes about 3 hours both ways and would have cost me about half of the price of my Eurostar ticket. Obviously this was unacceptable and totally unfeasible (It would have meant I would have had to be in Antwerp for a little over 2 hours before turning back to be able to catch my train home), so I had to cancel&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Would I have planned better without the Eurostar? Probably. But I would have ended up taking the less sustainable solution of grabbing a flight back to London&#8230; Maybe this is something services like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dopplr.com\">Dopplr<\/a> can start to address more clearly: managing travel expectations in a world where the diversity in service delivery forces users to make less sustainable decisions.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You can fly tomorrow and meet Y, and if you&#8217;re in town B suggests you go have coffee at Tree &#038; Leaf&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/cocooncharacters.com\/main.php\">Lina<\/a> from <a href=\"http:\/\/fo.am\">fo.am<\/a> for a great stay in Bruxelles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>View Larger Map So I am no longer a &#8220;St-Pancreas virgin&#8221; as a fellow traveller in the train referred to it, and it&#8217;s frankly really great. It took me a little over 2 hours (or about 40 rows of knitting since that&#8217;s what&#8217;s making transportation such a breeze these days) to get to Bruxelles and&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/how-i-got-eurostarred\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How I got Eurostarred<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-traveling","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-by","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}