Friday August 1, 2025
Fun fact: Belgium is a new country for us! I think that makes 49 countries visited so far! Steve thinks it is more... he can fact check me later. 😁
Today we disembarked the Regal Princess. All in all it was an excellent cruise!
We elected to carry our own bags off. I'm not sure if this used to be a choice or not, but I definitely prefer this. The old way was, we had to put our bags out the night before and they took them down to the terminal for us. Then when they called your number you had to hunt for your bags in a room of about 3000 other bags! The other benefit of taking your own bags off is that you can pretty much walk off whenever you like, instead of departing at a set time. Interestingly nobody checked our bags or our passports as we got off the ship... or even asked us any questions.
So after departing the ship we headed out to take a taxi to Southampton Central train station. Our plan for today is a train to London, a taxi between train stations and then the Eurostar train through the Chunnel to Belgium.
We arrived within 10 minutes to the train station. We weren't sure, at first, if he dropped us off at the right spot because it looked different than last time. With a bit of investigating we realized he dropped us off at the back, so made our way up over the pedestrian bridge to the other side.
There is very little space to sit and wait in the train station. It is more of a "arrive when you are ready to get right on your train" type of station. Two years ago we also took a train from here after a cruise, so knew we could go sit and Starbucks across the street and enjoy a drink (and wifi at last!) while we waited for our train.
Our train ride had a slight delay while we were on the train as another train had broken down on the tracks ahead of us and was causing a traffic jam. We only ended up being 30 minutes delayed, which was fine for us because we had built in a lot of buffer time between each segment of our journey today.
This train is more like a commuter train, so there wasn't anywhere to put our luggage. Luckily the train wasn't full so our luggage sat on a seat in front of us.
Even with our delay we still had time for lunch at St. Pancras train station before we checked in for our Eurostar train. We ended up at a restaurant called Le Pain Quotidien (which we later discovered is a chain founded in Brussels) and enjoyed a tasty lunch.
Check in, passport control and security was easy and efficient at St. Pancras. Once you check in you are in a waiting area that looks big, but isn't nearly big enough to house all the people waiting to take a train with their luggage. We stood for quite a long time until some chairs became available. There were trains going to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam in the time while we waited for our train.
Our assigned seats were in carriage 18 which was the furthest carriage from the gate. We still had ample time to walk to our train, stow our luggage in an actual luggage rack this time and get comfortable in our seats.
Last time we rode the Eurostar to Paris, we didn't even realize we were in the Chunnel, so I was determined to pay closer attention this time! As you leave London you do go through a series of tunnels (some as long as 1 minute) so I think I just got lulled into not paying attention last time. We only realized we had been through the Chunnel last time, because I noticed the cars were driving on the other side of the road all of the sudden!
So this time I timed the tunnels on my phone. Turns out it takes 20 minutes and 20 seconds to ride a train in a tunnel under the ocean to continental Europe!
The whole train ride took about two hours to travel 317 km.
This convenient sign let us know how fast the train was going. The fastest we saw was 294 km/hour.
We arrived at Brussels Midi train station and stayed in the hotel that is right in the train station, as we are taking a train tomorrow to Bruges. The hotel was nice, clean and very convenient. It was late so we didn't need to eat, but this train station had a good variety of restaurants and shops available if you needed anything.
Tomorrow we catch the train to Bruges!
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