Three months without a car creates some very interesting and challenging modes of transport. Getting from New York to Brussels by public transport was not simple. We began our journey on Wednesday afternoon at about 4pm from our New York apartment on the Upper West Side. Firstly we walked up to 79th street and caught our favorite subway, the No. 1 line downtown to 34th Street and Penn Station. From there we caught the E line to Jamaica Circle, a slightly longer trip of about 50 minutes. From there we traveled for about 15 minutes on the sky train to the airport at JFK. After a number of rather ordinary American Airlines flights to and from South America it was a delight to board a British Airways jumbo at about 8.10pm to head for London. As we taxied out we experienced a huge traffic jam – as about 15 planes were lined up in front of us to wait in turn to take off. The flight to London took about 8 hours and with time differences we arrived in London at about 8am. Next was a tube ride into Kings Cross station, which took about an hour. After a couple of hours wait we boarded the Eurostar bound for Brussels. Two hours and twenty minutes later, and in another time zone, we arrived at Brussels South Station, on Thursday afternoon. Finally we got a taxi to our hostel – a very pleasant and trendy backpackers establishment quite close to the centre of Brussels. The good news about this trip was that the overnight flight meant we saved a night’s accommodation costs, which helped with our budget. The bad news of course is that we did not get much sleep.
Mark Twain believed the journey was as important as the destination and our little subway, subway, sky train, jumbo, tube, eurostar, and taxi adventure crossing three time zones, three currencies, a few languages, the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel was tiring but very memorable.
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