Valenciennes; Sunday, 28 June, 2026

The thunderstorms finally arrived during the night, with some pretty heavy rain pounding on the windows waking me up, to discover that the aircon, which hadn’t been great to begin with, was not working at all. Switching it all off and back on again got a bit of a breeze going, but over the following hours the temperature in the room did climb and by the time I woke up again about 6am it was pretty hot in the room so going back to bed wasn’t an option.

I had a relatively early breakfast and headed back to my room to pack before heading out for a final wander around the city, not that there was much left to see as I’d pretty much visited everything the previous day.

There were just a couple of parks that looked relatively interesting, starting with the small Parc Jehan Froissart located quite close to the hotel which is named for the Medieval French poet. From there I had a short walk up to the Parc des Prix de Rome which is a larger park on the opposite side of the main ring road, and when it opened in 2003 had the addition Jardin Jacques Chirac added to his name as the then French president was in town to open both the park and other developments in the city.

Having looked around the parks I’d pretty much exhausted all there was to do in the city so with a couple of hours to spare I made my way over to the station and caught the train two hours earlier than I’d originally planned back over to Lille to spend the rest of the time there.

I had about 90 minutes of wandering around the city before it was time to start heading in the direction of the station for the Eurostar home, my idea being to see if I could get whilst the 17:35 train was just reaching the end of check-in in case I could once again get moved forward a train.

It wasn’t to be this weekend, partly due to all of the trains being fully booked, which I should have realised given that until Thursday I was booked on the 19:33 until it was cancelled and I was moved back onto the 18:35. However the main reason was because the 17:35 was already delayed and in the end was over two hours late leaving.

Because it was running late, and because space is limited in the departures area in Lille we were all held out in the station hall until 19:15 at which time the earlier train passengers were ushered down onto the platform and we were finally allowed through into the departures lounge to be able to sit down.

Our train ended up being delayed by nearly 90 minutes so it was long after the time we were supposed to be in London before we even got down onto the platform at Lille to start the delayed journey home.