13 Nov.

Woke up to rain in Brussels. Not much time to sea the nuclearium or the Little Boy Peeing sculpture. We found a café beside the hotel that had just opened at 9:00 and we had a basic breakfast.

Off to the train station to catch the train to London.

Great train, great ride, terrific service, food was wonderful, channel was dark and made our ears pop. Didn’t know that the train travelled at 185kph in the tunnel and the wind outside the train was 200kph.

The conductor gave the boys a great education, and me, on the speed, the wind, the depth- only 20-50m under the sea floor. We were 500m – 1.5km below sea level. There are three tunnels. The two outer ones for the trains are 40m apart, and the smaller centre one has cars that travel in it for emergencies. If a train has to stop, all trains stop in both directions.

We arrived at London St. Pancras station to find the Victoria line closed for engineering work. We had to find an alternate route to our Gatwick hotel. The line ups to get tickets were incredibly long, the ticket booths were closed. I chose to walk to another station with the boys.

The line ups were far shorter and in no time we were off on the tube to Gatwick Airport.

Shuttled to the Holiday Inn hotel. We were greeted by a man in a red tuxedo- something new I said to the fellow. He nodded but he was for a wedding reception. We were bushed (tired). Decided to take the boys to Tesco for a quick gant. Outside the hotel sat a new Black RangeRover with ribbons and a bow on it.

At Tesco I bought them another Lego toy figure. The sidewalk next to the road was odd, it was small, covered in branches from overhanging trees and shrubs, and almost no one was walking on it. Beyond the trees and shrubs lay open green pastures for the horses, covered in blankets.

We ate at the hotel and had a wonderful meal, for some reason they discounted the bill by %15.