Eurostar Breaks

Posts Tagged ‘ashford’

We’d like to tell you about our Eurostar breaks to Paris and the Marais quarter recently. We booked the Eurostar train only via a link on the Eurostar Breaks website and by being flexible with dates and booking around three months in advance managed to secure the £69 return tickets that we wanted, with seats together and at a civilised time of day, neither departing too early in the morning nor arriving back too late at night, so that was all good. Ideally, I would have like to have travelled from Stratford International changing at Ebbsfleet international but that seems to narrow down the choice and availability too much so it was to St Pancras Station that we needed to set off for, after the 9.30 am rush hour time zone ended. St Pancras is a lovely station mind, with good quality shops and cafes so that’s no great hardship really, and if the Circle Line tube isn’t running for some reason, as sometimes happens at weekends, then there are always plenty of alternative options.

St Pancras Station for Eurostar Breaks

Since the new high speed one line was completed a couple of years ago, the journey through East London and Essex is so much faster and you wizz through Ashford and arrive at the channel tunnel entrance at Folkestone in no time. Then there’s the rush through French countryside and as you enter the suburbs or Paris, a curious thing happens. All the French people on the train get out of their seats and start getting their belongings together and queuing up in the carriage corridor. There’s still five minutes left to travel and everybody is going to arrive at Gare du Nord, so why do they do it? It’s a mystery.

Having booked the Eurostar breaks only, we had to find a hotel for our stay in Paris and that’s something I’ve done lots of times before so it’s not a problem, it’s just that there’s a little concern over getting a reasonable hotel these days since the prices have gone up a bit, year after year in Paris. If you go by the websites, then you’d think you have to pay £250 a night ( or rather two hundred and fifty Euros) but that isn’t actually the case. Simply by asking it is common to obtain a 20% discount off the advertised rate for a room, but if the first two or three hotels you look at are already fully booked, then it does make you tend to accept the first vacancy available after that so beware.

Choosing which quarter you want to stay in Paris is the important thing, and after staying in the Latin Quarter so many times we decided to try the Marais instead this time and it worked out really well. The Marais has plenty of interesting streets to wander about in, lively cafes, tasty restaurants and colourful people. It’s all there. The best way to show you how much we enjoyed our Eurostar break in Paris this time in the Marais I think is to included a bunch of photographs from the trip which I hope you enjoy looking through and inspire you to maybe visit the Marais yourself next time you’re travelling to Paris for a short city break by Eurostar from London.