As we arrived into Heathrow, I was expecting a couple of things. The first was that we were going to have to wait in a long line to go through customs and because we are Americans it would go quick. Well the first thing as we got in was like a mile long walk as the pilot parked our plane in the back of the parking lot. This helped get over the 10 hours of sitting though and we quickly learned that even though we had awesome bags they were still a little heavy. Well we make it to the “Border Control” area and almost everyone on our flight goes to the EU Passport area and almost no one goes to the Non-EU area! Woohoo!! Very exciting, this is going to take much less time than I thought it would. We were on a tight schedule, we had 3 hours from the time our plane landed to get to the Eurostar and go to Brussels.
We get to our turn in line and we go to the border control guy and hand him our slip that tells him why we are traveling and where we are staying and for how long. Well, we were technically only going to be in the UK for 3 hours. This made him give us a very weird look. I guess this wasn’t super normal. He then tells us that he is giving us a travel visa and if we don’t leave the country in 24 hours we will be deported. “OK sir, sounds good,” I said as I was thinking, “Now we really have to make our train.” As he is stamping our passports someone comes up in the line next to us and I think, man, I recognize that voice. I look up and it is Will Arnet! What! Crazy! Gob is right there next to us! Pretty darn cool to see a celebrity as you are getting your passports stamped.
That is done and we make our way to the Heath Bar Express (it is really called Heathrow Express but I was tired and kept calling it that and doesn’t a heath bar just sound good). Anyways that is an awesome train, into London in 15 minutes! We just had to go Paddington to St Pancras and then we are off to Belgium. So we Minded the Gap for our first time as we got on a circle line train to St Pancras! This is where we would get the first taste of heavy security. Lots of armed guards were around as we got to the Eurostar line, which we were too early for, oops. Guess I didn’t really need to worry about being late. So we meandered around, got some snacks and then got back in line. Oh boy was this a fiasco.
Line was long, but that was expected, especially with the Brussles bombing happening 5 days before we left. It would have been fine but the X-ray machines stopped working right before we were about to go through them, so we had to wait while we were carrying our stuff because it was too jam packed to take off our backpacks. Also the French/Belgian people behind us were being super rude and pushing us, ugh, we couldn’t go anywhere. The line finally gets moving and the French lady behind us reaches underneath me to grab a bin when she could have just been patient and waited. Just bothersome when you have had almost no sleep for 36 hours. We get through the X-ray, but my wife’s bag gets selected “randomly” to be searched. Her bag has a butterfly patch on it, the butterflies on it are yellow and pink, they must have been scared of the menacing butterflies. Then the guy empties out the entire bag that we had just packed to perfection. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but it is my wife’s 30th birthday the day we landed and this is happening. Well that ridiculousness ends and we are finally into the waiting area. Shortly after our train finally comes and we are on our way to Brussels.
Travel Tales From BB-8 