I continue to be very concerned about excessive amounts of airplane travel. The only good thing I can say about the discount short-haul airlines is that it means that people arrive in other cities without their personal car, and that might mean they will take more public transit there. Numerous people have commented how a major attraction for USA residents to visit Disney Land is that they get to visit a walkable city!

My first IETF meeting was in 1996, in LA. It was IETF35, and I’ve physically been to about 2/3 of the meetings since. That’s about 60 meetings in total. I started a list to keep track of how many in-person, and how many remote.

I used to even have a log of how many flights I’d ever been on in my life, and the number was not small. The list fell apart in 2001… In 2000/2001, I was turned into from a lead software architecture at Solidum into a Sales Engineer. There was just one of me, because hiring good people was hard, and I had three sales people that I supported. For about 9 months, I travelled almost every week, mostly North American short-haul flights. I learnt that the “day-trip” to Boston would have turned into a three day trip by the time I landed as the other sales people allocated my time for sales meetings.

There was a point when I thought of number of flights as a status symbol, and I have colleagues who have gamified the collection of frequent flyer points. I even have a brother who has perfected the art of arbitrage among loyalty programs to get free travel and stays. See, for instance https://estrategiafinancas.com/?p=4503

There are also interesting youtubes about how airlines are really weird kind of banks, as their loyalty programs are often worth more than the airline.

In Spring of 2019, I was asked to go to RIPE78 in Iceland to talk about a project I was working on. The logistics were too late, and then WOW Airline collapsed, and many people were also affected. So I was scheduled to present remotely, but we ran out of time, so I went to RIPE79 in the fall in Rotterdam, and to DESCON in Serbia before that. This was probably not the first combined trip I did, but maybe it was the most impactfal, as I took the poorly regarded train from Belgrade to Zagreb, and then overnight to Berlin, and then after 3 days there, to Rotterdam. (That was also the trip that introduced me properly to Berlin, and my desire to relocate there)

Since then, I’ve tried to combine as many trips as possible, substituting trains for short-haul flights. In November 2022, I combined RIPE85+IETF115 as well as NoTimeToWait. (I couldn’t get to/from Serbia this time without airplanes, because the trains were killed by Pandemic) In November 2023, it was IETF118+RIPE87 and RustConf, but over 5 weeks.

In November 2024, I attended 4 events over 4 weeks. Two flights across the Atlantic, 22 trains and 2 ferries. Let me detail things before I review how it went.

1. Fly Ottawa to Paris on the direct flight. AF started this in 2023, previously I would have taken the train to Montreal and KLM to Schipol.
2. RER to Gare-du-Nord, followed by Eurostar to London. I find it funny that I enter Europe for approximately 2 hours. I attended the IoTsecurityfoundation.org’s conference.
3. On Saturday, Eurostar to Brussells, then DB to Berlin. Two nights in Berlin, including hashing there.
4. Monday morning, DB to Prague, arriving by noon for RIPE89. RIPE’s Monday morning is tutorials.
5. Thursday evening, European Sleeper from Prague to Brussels. Then Eurostar to London. Then Avanti-West to Hollyhead. Then a Ferry to Dublin. Plan to arrive Friday just before midnight. IETF121 is in Dublin, preceeded by the Hackathon.
6. Saturday after IETF121, Ferry from Dublin to Hollyhead, and then Avanti-West to London. Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday I attended a British Interplanetary Space event.
7. Thursday, I take Eurostar back to Paris, then RER to CDG for the 13:30 flight back to Ottawa.
8. For the first time, I was able to take the Ottawa LRT from the airport to home.

So how did it go?

The AF flight from Ottawa lands at CGD at 6am, and one can generally count on getting through immigration, and baggage claim, and then the endless walk across CDG-2 to get to the train station by about 7:30am. The RER is often an express to Gare-du-Nord, and that went fine, although the ticket scenario for the airport is still confused. Getting the ticket with the airport fee is the part that seems to take the longest.

I have to remember when exiting the metro at Gare du Nord to always go ALL THE WAY south and go up the escalators to the main level. If you turn early, then you wind up in a passageway that crosses under all the tracks, and one winds up on the west side of the station, where the taxis are, and it’s an annoying walk on cobbles back to the station. I think that I made this mistake on this trip again.

So it’s now 8am-ish, and I’m in the line for the Eurostar for the 9am train. A slight later train, such as a 9:30am train is perhaps a more certain choice. Stupid BREXIT means that there are three lineups: one to exit Europe (I do this on my Canadian passport), one to enter the UK (I do this on my UK passport), and then the airport-style-security theatre, because what if Sein Fein/IRA still has sleeper cells in Paris? All of this went well, but I’ve done this a few times now, including a number of times from Amsterdam airport.

Yes, I’m a UK-born Canadian, I have dual citizenship, and until Jan.31, 2020, European citizenship. Now gone, alas.

Getting to London, St.Pancras, I exit and walk down Woburn Pl. I have booked at The President Hotel, one of six hotels in the area owned by the same family. I got a good rate at The President Hotel, but in subsequent travel, it returned to being the most expensive in the grouping, and two weeks later, I was at a different hotel.

When I started taking the Eurostar to/from London, I realized that I was almost always on the 6am or 7am Eurostar, and I decided to optimize for that 4am walk to St.Pancras.

I attended meetings, went hash running on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I had one meeting the Tuesday in Zurich, which I would have liked to attend in person, but the logistics of doing that and then being in London for the IoTSF meeting on Wednesday was too much. A late night flight from Zurich, and arriving at a hotel at 1am, and not really sleeping much. So I was remote for that meeting, from my hotel room.

In 2023, I had travelled from London to Prague, when the IETF meeting was in Prague. DB track work broke the connection in Munich (they told me weeks in advance), suggesting an alternate route involving regional trains. That alternative failed, and I wound up going to Munich on the original ticket, and having to stay there. I got to that IETF hackathon at 1pm.

So for the 2024 trip, since I had more time, if I couldn’t make it in one hop, I’d strand myself somewhere that I preferred, and that was Berlin. So Saturday, I took the 8:16AM Eurostar to Brussels. I would connect to a DB train there to Frankfurt, and another train from there to Berlin, with a scheduled arrival at 8pm. I had booked at the Amano Group hotel right near the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, because train arrival departure times.

(PS: Both the Imperial Hotel chain in London, and the Amano Group have bespoke reservations systems which create non-compliant emails which Tripit is unable to scrape. Explaining the mix of Latin-1 and UTF-8 to them, and the HTML in the text/plain part is impossible. I hope they will learn from the results of the IETF SML WG)

Everything on the Eurostar went well, I seem to book the Eurostar Standard Premium, in order to get a single seat. Advanced booked, it’s only a few dollars more. The breakfast is not fantastic, but the coffee+tea is appreciated. The most annoying part is that I want the tray to go away so I can return to laptop. The wifi is terrible from London to the Chunnel, when one ought to be above ground. The wifi through the Chunnel is actually good. The wifi on the France and Belgium side is just fine.

Eurostar has X-ray screening as you arrive at St.Pancras. This one women three people ahead of me, thinking she was very posh, couldn’t understand that there are four places to undress into the X-ray trays. I tried to explain to her, but she was offended… “So rude!” she said. So I pushed around her and did my thing while she waited for the spot she thought was for her. Well, holding up the line like that is, for me, very rude. Learn to queue.

Then the UK exit stamp on my UK passport. Then the French/Europe entrance stamp on my Canadian passport. I could certainly enter Europe on my UK passport, but I decided in 2022 that I’d stick to the Canadian one so that nobody would accuse me of trying to get around the 90-day visa limit. I am obligated to enter Canada on my Canadian passport, and to enter the UK on the UK passport. I didn’t know until 2012ish, that this was required, and had used my Canadian to enter the UK before.

I made friends with the people around me, learning that both families were also going to Berlin. About 20 minutes from Brussells MIDI (the main train station), the train stopped. A few minutes later, an announcement told us that there was a security problem on the tracks ahead and trains had to stop.

Translation: someone jumped in front of a train. Note to people trying this, apparently, it’s very very traumatic for the train engineer, screws up the train system a lot. And… it’s not actually fatal as often as people think. So if you are thinking about ending your life this way, pick a more considerate way. You’ll probably just wind up a parapalegic rather than dead.

We sat for just over an hour, and the 1.5 hour transfer time at Brussells for our connecting train was disappearing. The Eurostar train moved, and we got to the terminal. Those of us transfering were anxious, and I offered to help one of the families, but after some discussion, we decided I would run, and try to delay the connecting train. It’s an annoying path from Eurostar to DB, but I made it across, and up the stairs, and got onto the first carriage I found, which was off-by-one for mine, but I stood in the doorway until I saw the other families arrive. Found my seat as the train was leaving the station.

Back to wifi and work. We get to Koln in Germany. The train station with the huge gothic church next to it. One time I’ll schedule a day or two there. I’ve heard Koln is the second best city for Klub Kulture (raves). We sit there. And sit there. WTF.

A rumour spreads that we are sitting there before… ANOTHER JUMPER. Someone else explained that this part of Germany (to the French border) was very economically distressed, and it was the suicide capital of Germany. Damn.

Finally, we leave and there are some other traffic delays, and it does not look like we are going to make the connection in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. Then just before we arrive at the Frankfurt Airport station, an announcement tells us that “Diese Zug Endet Hier” The train will not be crossing the bridge into the city, because we missed our slot. The bridge across the river is apparently undergoing repairs, the first major repair it’s had since 1946, and it’s at like 20% of it’s normal capacity. Damn. People ending at Frankfurt could just get an S-Bahn home.

My primitive German overhears hints from other passengers, and I follow them at a run up the escalator, and across to a track where a train is sitting. It’s the MILK RUN to Berlin from the Airport. I remember seeing it listed when I booked the ticket. It was ten minutes slower. I get on. I haven’t got a reserved seat, but my ticket is otherwise good for it. I had booked 1st class the entire way, so I quickly poked the DB app, and for 5EU got another reservation on it, basically the seat I was already in. That train went, and we were not late to Berlin at all.

The next day, Sunday, I went to the Berlin Hash, and then I did my laundry at a place I knew. And I got on the train to Prague in the morning. At the Prague train station, Google Maps tried to tell me to take a regional train from the main station to the station near where RIPE was, but doing this seemed broken: the train was not on the schedule, getting a ticket seemed impossible. I got on the metro, taking two metros out to the Clarion where the meeting was.

Some days at RIPE. Then, on Thursday around 4pm, at the nearest break, I retrieved my luggage and got on the metro back to the train station. This was the third time I’ve left Prague on a Thursday by overnight train. The other times were in the 2000s, on DB trains, headed to Italy. This time was European Sleeper to Brussels. The train was at 6pm, and I got there around 5pm.

The Prague train station has many nice modern renovations, but a sensible offering of seating is not one of them. Is it, like the Ottawa LRT stations, optimized against homeless people, rather than people who use it? The information panels, when they finally showed my train, showed that it was delayed.

Informational panels without enough space really annoy me. I understand that sometimes they just don’t know what platform the train will use. I also understand that they also don’t want to tell people to go to the wrong place, or to go someplace and crowd up that space. Airports have the same problem, notably Heathrow, but at least you know you are in the right concourse. Unless your flight is cancelled at the very last minute, but if there is some larger structural problem, they won’t let you checkin. Not really the case for train stations.

My train said it was ~10~ minutes delayed, rolling forward by ten minutes each time. In the end, it was delayed an hour. I could waited entirely somewhere else had I known. Found a place to settle down with my laptop. Delays ought to result in easier access to lounges. So the train would leave around 7pm, which everyone learnt around 6:45. There was a rush to platform. If there was any information about which wagon would be where, it wasn’t communicated or it was outright wrong. My wagon, which I think was 18, was at one end of the train, and I got on, and found my room.

I was alone in the room when the train left the station. So a 1hr delay at the beginning of the trip, when the train had sat all day in a yard. Whatever mechanical/maintenance problem there was that caused this delay obviously was not found very early, or it took all day and then some, to resolve. My room had no outlet power, the sink did not work, and the toilets at the end of the wagon were not functional. Fortunately, the next car’s toilet was fine. European Sleeper has not been able to invest enough to fix what I see are significant problems.

The trip went well, with two new people joining my room in Germany, before Berlin, I think. I had been assigned the top bunk I think. It often has slightly more leg room (I’m 182cm… 6’) and the reading light (which did work) is better. Still, I fear losing glasses, phone, and falling out when trying to get down to pee.

We were to arrive in Brussells at 9:27, with the Eurostar to London at 10:23. Just enough time. Only we left an hour late, and despite many many sections where I’m sure we could have gone 10% faster, and station stops that could have been 5min shorter, we only made up 40 minutes. Nobody got out at Breda (south Netherlands), but we still stopped there. Had there been anyone that needed to go to Breda, they should have been told to get out at Rotterdamn and given an NS ticket. Breda is 10min away.

There were perhaps a dozen people running off the European Sleeper for the Eurostar. We got there just before 10am. They would not let us board, since they had to do their security theatre and passport control. Nobody in line. All X-ray machines running. The one man who had a first class ticket was allowed through. The rest of us were bumped to the 2:30pm train. Oops, there goes my connecting trains in London, and my 8pm Ferry. I wasn’t the only one with connecting trains.

I’ve spent too much time in Brussells-Midi train station between trains it seems, as I know it way too well. I took a walk around outside, but it was grey and too much construction. I re-entered, got a waffle, and then settled at Starbucks (the most comfortable spot) to work. I reached out to the Ferry, and they rebooked me from the 8pm Ferry to Dublin to the 1am sailing (I can’t recall the exact time now). I looked at my connecting train tickets. One was “This train only”, and the second and third legs were completely open.

When I arrived, I walked from St.Pancras over to Euston. It was 4pm-ish. I spoke to an agent, and rebooked me. Cost 20GBP. I didn’t know/think I could take my European Sleeper “late” excuse to London, but other people told me that I should have been able to do that. I asked for the latest train possible, because I had previously spent time in Holyhead in the night, and there is really nothing there. One is lucky if the leave the lights on. I found a pub, ordered some drinks and food, and settled down. It was Friday Nov. 1, so Halloween was still in full swing. There was promotion for free tequila. Nice.

I took the train up to Crewe, caught the shuttle to Chester, and got on the train to Holyhead. I think that train starts in Liverpool and it was just short of midnight. My car was full of youths, barely 20, coming from a costume party. They are drunk, stoned, loud, but pleasant and curious. I talk to them. One is bleeding on their arm, a very minor wound that they haven’t a clue how they did. “Does someone have a plaster?” one of the two 19yr old twins dressed as Playboy Bunnys. (Well. Undressed) “Yes!”, I think… thrilled that I could translate plaster to bandaid, and thinking I had one. Only it wasn’t actually that… it was a Breath-Right nose strip that I had. Oops. I realized as they opened it. “What the fuck is that?” they giggle. I explain. “Oh!” says one of the Bunnys, handing it to her boyfriend. “You are wearing this tonight! You always snore when you are drunk”. HA. So useful afterall. They alight before Holyhead, and we pass through a few other small towns, and I’m curious what rent is there…. yeah, still 1000GBP/month for a one-bedroom!

Get to Holyhead, a ferry has just come in, and there are people. The convenience store is just about to close as I manage to buy some milk. I find a corner near an outlet, no seats, and sit on the floor. There are other people charging phones. Would a few tables kill them? Sure, bolt them down. More than a dozen people milling around. Finally, 90minutes later, boarding starts. More fake security as we pass through stuff to another room where we wait a few minutes. No announcement, people just start disappearing out the door. Unlike the time I took it in 2018, they had an actual bus to take us onboard organized. The Ferry does not board there (anymore?) but on the other side of the inlet, and the bus drives for 10 minutes through dockyards and car-parks and hundreds of lorries. (I remember seeing trains get on the Saint-John/Digby Ferry in NB, before they punched a Four Lane Trans-Canada through the Westchester mountains in NS)

On the Ferry, I found a spot in the Stena Plus Lounge. It’s really not much of an added expense, I’m surprised so few people use it. I’d also think that they ought to just randomly upgrade people to it as a promotion whenever it’s less than 30% full. Like that night, there was perhaps 10 people in a space that accomodated at least 200. I found a spot at the front, and outlets, and charged stuff, and tried to watch netflix on my tablet. I could only tell that we’d sailed because GPS told me, there was no sense of motion in the dark. I fell asleep. I woke in the dark to an announcement that we’d arrive soon. We arrived 5:30am ish, and there was another annoying bus to take us off the Ferry.

Gangplanks are not a thing for many of the Ferries. That tells you how many people use train+ferry, despite some promotion. How many drive, but most fly now. By chance more than planning, I and many others found “the” bus into Dublin Center. It was not, it seems, actually a city bus. I was confused. I think I couldn’t find a way to pay, and the driver, who seemed to be running late and at the end of his shift didn’t care. We went right past my hotel, but no stop there, and I was deposited 500m further downtown at the Connoly Train Station. I walked the 500m back to The Samuel, where I was staying. It was just 6am. I had emailed ahead, and paid for the night I had missed (I was supposed to arrive just before midnight). So my room was waiting, and I went up, and I slept until 10am, at which point I went to the IETF121 Hackathon.

There is more: the trip back to London, and then back to Canada, but I’ll make another post.