No Munich...

Our preChristmas vacation plans have been thwarted by the huge failure of Eurostar. We were supposed to cross the English Channel this morning at 6:50 am on the train that takes cars through the chunnel. It snowed quite a bit yesterday in Eastern England and Northern France. The storm caused the ferries across the channel to close so we thought that all of the traffic going towards the chunnel last night was because of the snow and rerouted ferry traffic. We stayed in a small hotel last night so we would make it to the train in time. We got on the road at 6 am and as we were coming up the highway there was a huge back up going the other way. The cars had their lights off and looked like they weren't even turned on - this turned out to be true since those people had been stuck on the highway for almost 10 hours. Mind you - it was 27 degrees last night - not so fun when you can't keep the car running because you don't want to run out of gas. We got off the highway and talked to a police officer who told us that there were 4 trains stuck in the tunnel and it didn't look like anything was going to start running again anytime soon. We drove up the road a bit to a rest stop to get some food and think about what we were going to do. We listened to people on the radio telling stories about how they were supposed to get on last night and were still delayed - in was almost 7 am by that point. We decided to just go home since even if the trains started running by noon - which isn't even looking likely - there would be such a huge back up that there was a good chance we wouldn't even get across today. Since we were only planning on spending 2 1/2 days in Munich, it seemed ludicrous to drive all that way for one day. And that is based on us making it on tomorrow - who knows if that would happen. So I am so disappointed. I was really looking forward to seeing Munich and going to Salzburg on the train. On the bright side, we will get to do some more Christmas preparation here - bake more cookies, get more wrapping done etc - and we'll be a little warmer. :)

Click here for a link to the BBC article about Eurostar