Campus Adventiste to Dover

This rainy Monday morning in Scotland, I want to share two days worth of traveling last week. A week ago yesterday, we woke up in a guest room at Campus Adventiste de Collonges-sous-Salève, just across the border from Geneva, Switzerland. We packed up our rental car to return to Cointrin Airport in Geneva, but made one last stop to see if we could say hello to my old roommate from 1965-1966. René Collin and I lived at Les Sources (the springs) that school year after I returned from selling books in Sweden.
We were so blessed. Even though we had missed René at church the day before, and although they weren't home on Sabbath afternoon, here were René and Régine this Sunday morning. We had just enough time before needing to catch our train in Geneva to stop and share some brief stories and memories - and set the camera up on the porch railing for an auto-shoot. We have exchanged Christmas cards with the Collins for years, but this was Vonnie's first time ever to meet them!
At René's suggestion, I refilled the car just across the border - but I was scolded by the owner of a new Mercedes station-wagon when I took a photo of it. Vonnie always says her 1994 Mercury Sable station-wagon is the most beautiful car on the road - still - that I wanted to document that the Mercedes designers have produced a model that is so similar!
By God's blessing we got on the freeway that took us straight to the airport, turned in the car, and hopped on the TGV (trés grand vitesse, or very great speed) that would take us to Paris.
(This is probably a good place to say that the word "hopped" is a euphemism for dragging two big suitcases and one heavy computer-bag and camera bag on their three sets of wheels, plus Vonnie's full back-pack and another hand-bag, and finally a hat. Then having to lift them all onto the railway car before searching for the right racks or storage areas - and sometimes discovering later on that they are in the wrong storage areas and having to move them all over again. On one train, in fact, we discovered we were on a car that wasn't going to our destination, so had to move two cars down. I ended up hauling the big bags, one at a time, out onto the platform and onto the new car during one brief stop! And in the stations we've discovered that sometimes there are elevators, and sometimes not. And there are sometimes escalators, and sometimes not! Try to imagine Vonnie with her backpack, big suitcase and handbag going up an escalator! Or me huffing and puffing up and down the stairs to the bridges over the tracks, one suitcase at a time. It was often downright scary - and proved damaging a few days later when Vonnie tripped on some uneven pavers as we were just pulling our loads up to the Leeds train station. Her knee, her shoulder, her neck and lower back are all still paining her as we move into our studying and writing phase. Yet, thankfully, she can still walk comfortably! Or so she claims.)
At one point the announcement came that our train had reached its maximum speed: 300 kmh/186 mph.
It was on this leg of our journey that we found ourselves sitting across a table from a grandmother and her 7-year old grandson. I had fun translating for her and Vonnie as they discussed family first, and then our two separate trips to the Holy Land. She had been with a tour group - a pilgrimage - and she and Vonnie shared how they had both been less than satisfied to visit the historic Church of the Holy Sepulcher. When Vonnie described how much she had enjoyed the Garden Tomb, just north of the current walls of the Old City, the lady was shocked that her tour had not included it. In fact she was downright upset that they hadn't even mentioned it! And when Vonnie produced a brochure from the site - in English - the lady dearly wanted to have a copy. When I tried to explain that the traditional site for Jesus' death and burial was probably right, but that the Garden Tomb seemed much better at preserving the feel of what it had probably been like, she laughed with joy when I told her that Vonnie disagreed with me and feels that the Garden Tomb is a much better candidate. She was so excited to learn that there was some other place beside the 1700 year old "tourist trap" that is holy to Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, and Ethiopian believers.
By the way, when I told her I was a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, she described how in her ancestral home of Cameroon, Africa, one was either Catholic, Charismatic or Seventh-day Adventist. Those three faith groups make up the majority of Christians there. She said she felt blessed to be traveling with a pastor.
In Paris we hired a taxi to take us from one station (Gare de Lyon) to our next station (Gare du Nord). It was fun just getting to drive through the streets of Paris again, and a whole lot easier than getting down to and up from, and on and off the underground Metro.
Our next stop, we thought, was Calais on the English Channel or La Manche as the French call it. Yes, our tickets did take us all the way there, but we had to stop at Lille, France, and leave the express station and "hop" back on a local train to Calais. After a taxi detour to the docks (for another man hoping to catch a ride across the Channel yet that evening), we settled into our room at "The Cottage Hotel".
The next morning a taxi delivered us to the ferry dock, and before long we were through customs and passport control and churning our way towards the cliffs of Dover. We started in a light rain and ended with broken sunshine. This was one of Vonnie's favorite parts of the trip. She remembered her father's retelling of the Dunkirk evacuation at the start of WW II, and of the first woman to swim across the Channel. She loves the ocean anyways, and wanted to be outside in the sea air the whole time. Here are a few shots:
We spent the rest of the day on two trains: one from Dover to London, (where we had to take "the Tube" to another station, and from London to Leeds in northern England. There we once again were in a wonderful Hilton Hotel by way of Merrel and Marie's gift. All in all it was a good day; in fact, one never to be forgotten with the delights of the Channel crossing.