21:00 we are in our room at chalon house — a very nice, large room with an equally nice large bath room (the bath itself is on a kind of raised platform). all very tastefully decorated (white and cream colours). we have just returned from a walk through richmond and along the thames — including a fantastic sunset!it is still a bit noisy outside but with our new silicon-basednoise-control earplugs that is not really an issue anymore and we are fast asleep (the first earplugs i can actually sleep with for a whole night!)

17:38 once we reached aachen, things took a slight turn south: due to onstruction work on the belgian-german high-speed link we got delayed by 25 minutes in aachen (ostensibly to let the thalys train coming from bruxelles through — but somehow we never saw that one). as most f the track to liege (.be) is not really high-speed yet (i'd rathercall craw-speed) we never recovered from that delay and arrive in bruxelles just when our eurostar was due to leave — and it has left, and without us.

luckily, it's not really a problem: the next one leaves at 17:01 and we are booked onto that one without hassle. nice on boarding we are almost crushed by a lady and her luggage tumbling down the escalator: luckily we can stop her without becoming part of the domino chain and together with her husband manage to put her pright again. quite a bit of excitement for a moment there.

right now, we are seated in first class, enjoy the complimentary drinks (cheers!), watch the belgian, sorry, french now, landscape being wisked past us at 300km/h … got to stop now, they are serving meals now.

definitely much better than flying, BTW

12:27 — we made our connection in frankfurt airport on time and are now in the ICE 14 to brussels. just as we had taken our reserved seats a siren started sounding outside the train in the airport station: all persons are to vacate the building immediately! the scary things was that it was not being cancelled and labelled as a false alarm, they kept it going — luckily, it didn't seem to apply to our train whose doors closed on time and we left as scheduled at 12:17. while moving out of the station, though, we could see people hurrying towards the rescue stations…wonder what happened there?

09:51 — after an early start we leave a bit too early (my eternal fear of missing a train connection, yes, i know) and end up at erlangen station 20 minutes early time enough to buy newspapers…the train to nürnberg is a bit delayed but not by much, we arrive ontime in nürnberg, get some food on board for the trip to frankfurt airport — and the IC 2028 arrives on time and leaves on time! nice

next item on the agenda: getting a cup of tea on a bahn.bonus voucher(i finally succeeded in getting my 1500 bahn.bonus points converted into five €5 vouchers, the first set was lost in transit from germany to switzerland, the second set eventually made it [and they can't send it to an address different from the "billing" address, otherwise we could have tried our erlangen address, hmph] — so there's a set of €5 bahn.bonus vouchers somewhere out there in the void between germany and switzerland, grab it if you see it floating by!)