{"id":3539,"date":"2018-07-03T09:22:24","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T08:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/?p=3539"},"modified":"2018-07-03T09:40:04","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T08:40:04","slug":"aime-to-london-london-to-amsterdam-amsterdam-back-to-london-and-more-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/aime-to-london-london-to-amsterdam-amsterdam-back-to-london-and-more-to-come\/","title":{"rendered":"Aime to London, London to Amsterdam, Amsterdam back to London, and more to come"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, it’s been more travelling and none of it went to schedule.\u00a0 It started fairly well with me up at about 05.00 on Monday the 25th.\u00a0 By 06.35 the view looked like this.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I was off on Cerise and rapidly aware that my hands were going to freeze as I shot down the mountain road with all its hairpins, dropping through that layer of cloud, into the valley you can see below it.<\/p>\n

For the first 5 to 10km I was doing that thing of alternating a hand in my armpit to stop them getting painfully cold but by 10km it was astonishing to find that already that wasn’t necessary and by the time I reached the town down there, not long after 07.00 it was already really warm there.\u00a0 Altitude really does affect ambient temperature; I think the rule of thumb is about 1\u00b0C for every vertical 100m so I guess I gained about 16\u00b0C from the apartment to the valley.<\/p>\n

Cerise and I waited happily in the increasingly frankly hot sun for Damien, kind partner of Aur\u00e9lie to arrive and haul Cerise away for safekeeping while I’m away.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Aur\u00e9lie works in the letting agency we use (Alp’agence\u00a0 www.alpagence.fr<\/a> for the French or http:\/\/www.alpagence.com\/en\/agency\/<\/a> gives some history in English).\u00a0 He was early and lovely and Cerise went off in the back of his pickup.\u00a0 That had all been great but from then on things were fraught.\u00a0 My 10.55 train just disappeared off the board with no comment or warning.\u00a0 The station in Aime turns out to have been closed though the trains still stop.\u00a0 That meant there was no-one to ask, and finding out information from the internet on my ‘phone was not easy.\u00a0 In the end I did make it back home, shortly before midnight instead of early evening, but the journey back had two steps and no-one able to confirm I would make it until I got to the ticket office in Gare du Nord in Paris and got my final ticket changed. Fortunately, both the ticket agents were friendly, believed me about the first train and changed my tickets without charging me.\u00a0 <\/cite><\/p>\n

The following day I was off to Amsterdam for the Society for Psychotherapy Research<\/a> conference there (http:\/\/www.sprconference.com\/<\/a>).\u00a0 I was taking no risks and got to Luton Airport really early … so I was trapped there for four and a half hours while EasyJet seemed to have lost interest in us and kept asking us to look at their app to find out what was happening.\u00a0 That was particularly unhelpful as most of the time the airport wifi didn’t work and, bizarrely, neither did my 3G.\u00a0 Not good!<\/p>\n

Wednesday to Saturday was pretty full on at the conference and I’m still digesting that.\u00a0 Hm, talking of digesting, here are some daft ‘photos in the spirit of my 2016 pelerinage.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>That cr\u00e8pe in Chamb\u00e9ry was after the first ticket agent had been lovely and fixed my next step, but warned me she couldn’t promise the next agent would be so sympathetic and that she couldn’t do me a ticket for the whole way back.\u00a0 The\u00a0cr\u00e8pe was\u00a0 very welcome but the cold water was even better as\u00a0 I had been roasting in Aime for the better part of five hours before the 12.55 train did <\/em>arrive and get me that crucial first step of the way home, by which time it started to look less than 50:50 that I’d make it.<\/p>\n

This, below, was my first evening in Amsterdam.<\/p>\n