Back to the UK

When we left the Georges Pompidou, there was a quick, 1 minute in and out of a Birkenstock store (Time stamp of going into the store 2:35 and coming out 2:36) as we headed back on the Metro to get our luggage and travel to Gare Nord for our Euro Train back to London.
The details on the short video shows as being at Montparnasse as 3 Place du 18 Juin, 1940, which is opposite the station nearest our airbnb apartment. Maybe it was the start of our travel towards Gare Nord, either way this guy got on with his large ghetto blaster loudly pumping out his beats he was grooving to. Somehow I expressed my displeasure at his imposing his music on us and he remonstrated with me to relax, get a life and get with the groove. Luckily for me, in my travel weary state, he got off at the next station just as I had thought to pull out my iPhone to illustrate my loss of reverie. You can hear the music still from the platform.
There was more weariness to come when we got to Gare Nord to get processed for the Eurostar train scheduled to leave at 5:30. It took so long to work our way through the snaking line up. Barb managed to hold our place while Jeantine and I went to get coffees, and then Jeantine left the Station building to go across the road to purchase snacks for us to have on the train. Then up one level and checked through security and lots of us hopeful passengers were left waiting and wondering.

This photo time stamped as 5:29pm and our train was scheduled to depart at 5:30.
Jeantine headed off to find out about the delay to be told there had been a WWII shell found in unattended luggage (souvenir?) which caused checks to be made to verify if it was a threat or not. This caused a lot of the waiting passengers to miss the 5:30 train. Jeantine went off again to see about getting on a later train and initially misunderstood the time on the reallocated seats, thinking we had quite a wait yet. Then when a lot of the other waiting passengers started moving, Jeantine checked the times again and whoops, we better get moving and join them on the platform below. A quick scramble and we found ourselves in a First Class carriage and sharing one seat with the friend of the woman I had caught in my photo before at 5:29. Our fellow passenger was quite chatty and informative between reading her book and conversing with her traveling companion who had been separated a couple seats along. I guess we were lucky to find our group of three seated together, considering the juggling the train staff would have had to do, to get everybody from two trains onto one.

Being First Class we were offered wine and food but having our own food we just went with the wine. 7:21pm on board the train with bottle of wine