"A WWII bomb might just be my ticket out of this travel nightmare..."
So, there we are, standing in Brussels Midi station, me gaping at the Eurostar board as every Paris train blinks "CANCELLED" in mocking red letters. The announcement crackles over the speaker – something about a WWII bomb, Paris on lockdown, chaos reigning supreme. My travel companion is perfecting her huff-and-eye-roll combo, that massive 23kg suitcase she's been dragging around Europe parked between us like a sullen third wheel. Her dark sunglasses (which hadn't left her face day or night since we arrived) hiding what I can only assume was the eye roll of the century.
And I'm just trying not to bite back laughter because... seriously? A bomb might just be my ticket out of this travel nightmare.
By this stage I am actually grateful for the chaos and the option to get myself away from this unfolding travel trip from Hell.
You're probably wondering how I ended up here. Honestly, I'm wondering the same thing.
It all started at Bath station. Me, excited, waiting for my old friend from thirty years ago. We weren't super close back then, but you know how it is – occasional dinners over the years, just enough contact to forget why you never made plans for a proper holiday together...
"Independence plus independence doesn't equal harmony when travelling – it equals a slow-motion car crash."
We are both fiercely independent women - I've literally written a book on the topic - which in hindsight should have been our first clue that this trip was doomed from the start.
Independence works beautifully in friendship when you're meeting for a two-hour dinner every few years. Independence plus independence doesn't equal harmony when travelling – it equals a slow-motion car crash, especially when one person's version of independence means controlling everything while the other's means actually going with the flow.
When she came off the train, we hugged and caught up, all smiles and excitement. Though I should have caught the first red flag when she mentioned how our mutual close friend was "very selfish" and she "had to lose it with him" during his trip to South Africa. Still, I was buzzing with travel excitement at this stage.
It wasn't until the next morning when I found her outside with an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, chain-smoking at 7am with a face like thunder, that I noticed something was off. "Maybe just airplane jitters," I said to myself, blissfully unaware of what was about to unfold.
The Amsterdam Chapter: When Google Maps Becomes the Enemy
It started in Amsterdam. Beautiful, laid-back, canal-lined Amsterdam.
"I know Amsterdam well," she announced confidently as we stepped off the train. I followed her lead out of the station, relieved to have a knowledgeable guide. We walked about ten steps before she stopped dead in her tracks, looking utterly confused.
"This doesn't make sense," she declared, staring at the unfamiliar exit. Rather than recalibrate, she immediately demanded a taxi. Before we even got into that taxi, she turned to me, finger pointed at my face like a stern teacher: "Do NOT talk to the taxi driver. You talk to everyone." She said this like my friendliness was a character flaw requiring intervention – apparently, a felony. I bit my tongue, nodded, and silently filed this moment away for the blog post I didn't yet know I'd be writing.
Forty euros later, we arrived at our hotel – which, as I later discovered, was approximately a five-minute walk from the station. I filed that one away for later.
Each morning in Amsterdam unfolded with the ceremonial Switching On Of All The Lights at an ungodly hour, followed by her hanging out on the street, chain-smoking and complaining about cigarette prices in Europe while blowing smoke in my face. Amsterdam sparkled; her mood stayed permanently grey.
The Google Maps Battles became my daily entertainment. At one point, genuinely confused, she marched into a shop to ask for directions, then emerged to inform me with complete conviction: "The arrow is facing the wrong way."
"I didn't have the heart (or the death wish) to explain that the arrow on Google Maps represents your position, not the direction you should be walking."
I didn't have the heart (or the death wish) to explain that the arrow on Google Maps represents your position, not the direction you should be walking. This technology, barely two decades old, was clearly part of a global conspiracy to make her specifically take wrong turns in Amsterdam.
"We'll do the shops tomorrow," she announced repeatedly, steering me away from any store that caught my eye. Tomorrow never came, of course. The perpetually postponed shopping expedition joined forces with her anger at closed croquette shops and the general audacity of Google Maps to continue existing.
The coffee shop visit should have been relaxing – it's Amsterdam, after all. Instead, it became the battleground for whether 15-minute cities existed.
"That's not a real thing. You're making that up," she insisted after I mentioned the urban planning concept.
"It's actually a well-established urban design principle where—"
"No. It's not real."
This, from the woman who had just purchased a pre-rolled joint in a licensed establishment where such things are normal. The imaginary concept was clearly 15-minute cities, not the space brownie on the menu. Logic was on holiday.
The crowning moment came when I struck up a conversation with our hotel manager – a really cool guy with recommendations for places tourists don't usually find. We hit it off, became instant besties, and exchanged WhatsApp details. I mean, isn't that what you do in a city like Amsterdam? Talk and vibe with people?
Later, I learned that during our chat, my travel companion had been pacing furiously outside, chain-smoking and glaring at us. Apparently, making a local friend was not on our approved itinerary.
By our last morning in Amsterdam, she was already "upset about leaving Amsterdam" – not actively enjoying our final hours there, mind you, but preemptively mourning our departure while still physically present. It was a unique approach to time management that would characterise our entire trip.
Little did I know that Amsterdam was just the warm-up act. Bruges was waiting in the wings, and with it, the Romantic Hotel Showdown that would change everything.
The Train Scene: Full White Lotus Mode
In we get on a crowded train from Amsterdam to Bruges. Cue the HBO opening credits. Two middle-aged women with vastly different approaches to life about to have their friendship tested in spectacular fashion. If Mike White had written this scene, it would have been the season finale cliffhanger.
We'd gotten on the train in first class, not realising our tickets were for regular seating. When the conductor politely informed us we'd need to move, I walked through the carriage and found two empty seats a few rows back. Crisis averted, right?
Wrong.
My travel companion took one look at those perfectly acceptable seats and decided they were beneath her dignity.
"Gail! KEEP MOVING STRAIGHT!" she bellowed across the crowded carriage, her voice bouncing off the windows and ceiling, turning every head in our direction. "MOVE! KEEP GOING!"
I walked forward, confused but compliant, feeling like a contestant on some deranged game show. Passengers stared. Some looked sympathetic. Others seemed entertained by the live theatre unfolding before them.
"STRAIGHT! KEEP WALKING!" The commands continued, each one louder than the last, as if volume was directly proportional to how quickly I should be moving. A one-woman loudspeaker assault. All that was missing was dramatic orchestral music and a camera slowly zooming in on my increasingly panicked face.
After parading me through the entirety of the train like a disgraced royal, she finally spotted a seat she deemed acceptable.
She sat down.
Just... sat down. In the seat. The singular seat. Leaving me standing there, surrounded by strangers, my dignity in tatters, and not a single available seat in sight.
I stood there for a moment, waiting for her to realise, to look around for me, to perhaps suggest we continue our search together. Nothing.
"She pulled out a book and began reading as if I'd magically disappeared or perhaps been raptured to train passenger heaven."
She pulled out a book and began reading as if I'd magically disappeared or perhaps been raptured to train passenger heaven.
I reversed course, walking back through the train in the direction we'd come, now a solo traveller on a quest for that most basic of train amenities: somewhere to put my arse for the next two hours.
Eventually, I found a seat in a completely different car. As I sat down, exhausted from the social marathon I'd just completed, I caught the eye of a Dutch woman across from me. She gave me a small, knowing smile that somehow communicated: "I saw what happened back there. You're better off here anyway."
In that moment, Jennifer Coolidge's character from White Lotus came to mind: "These gays, they're trying to murder me." Except in my version, it was "This friend, she's trying to destroy my will to live."
Little did I know, this train scene was just the amuse-bouche to the five-course meal of chaos that awaited us in Bruges.
The Bruges Showdown: Breaking Point at the "Romantic Hotel"
We arrived in Bruges, that picture-perfect medieval town with its canals and cobblestones. Our hotel was absolute magic old world charm. "Romantic Hotel" written right above it – a place clearly designed for couples on dirty weekends, not two middle-aged women on the verge of a friendship extinction event.
The irony was lost on neither of us, but probably more appreciated by me.
Our first night in Bruges was relatively uneventful, apart from her constant complaints about Google Maps (still wrong, apparently, despite guiding millions of people around the globe daily), the long train journey (how dare trains actually take time to get to locations) and her ongoing battle with the concept of 15-minute cities (still not real, despite evidence to the contrary).
Then came The Morning.
I was sleeping peacefully in our dark room, enjoying the few precious moments of rest before our day in Bruges. The sun wasn't even up yet. Neither was most of Belgium.
CLICK. CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.
Not just the bedside lamp. Not just the bathroom light. EVERY. SINGLE. LIGHT.
She proceeded to shower, loudly, while I pulled the covers over my head and switched off the lights nearest my bed. When she exited the bathroom she grabbed her cigarettes and left the room not turning any of the lights back off. I awoke a few hours later to her knocking on the door. I opened the door to her announcing "Come come! We must go see the square!"
But something felt off. I had this strange premonition, this gut feeling that we needed to get to Paris immediately. "Maybe we should head straight to Paris now and not wait till this afternoon," I suggested.
"No," she insisted, "let's have breakfast." But breakfast with her had become a minefield of potential arguments. I made innocent small talk, mentioning something about the reticular activating system in the brain – you know, casual breakfast chat about the work I do.
"I've heard of the hippocampus, but there's no such thing as the RAS," she declared with the confidence of someone who had never Googled brain anatomy.
This came just days after she'd insisted I had "made up" the term "15-minute cities, yet again." I pulled out my phone, showed her a diagram of brain anatomy, and pointed to the RAS.
"Oh well, that's not how you said it," she huffed. "You didn't explain it well, Gail."
By the time we returned to the ironically named Romantic Hotel to collect our bags for Paris, I was vibrating with a week's worth of suppressed frustration. I set my bag down in the lobby and walked into the lounge - all chandeliers, book shelves, and wing back chairs - the kind of space made for couples to whisper sweet nothings to each other, not for friendship implosions.
I fell into one of the wing back chairs before looking at her sitting on the opposite chair, all pissed off and angry for no apparent reason.
"I am done," I announced, surprising even myself with the firmness in my voice. "I am not coming to Paris. I want to go home."
The hotel staff exchanged glances that said, "Ooh, drama with the English ladies!" more clearly than if they'd spoken out loud.
"You're angry and mean," I continued, unleashing a week's worth of pent-up observations in one rather succinct assessment. "I cannot continue walking on eggshells around you, it's exhausting, I am done."
She responded with what was becoming her signature move: sulking with an intensity that could power a small city, if only we could harness it as renewable energy.
"Well," she finally said, "I've booked Paris, so I have to go, and I don't have a phone (well she does but doesn't trust it)."
I couldn't just leave her so off we went. We took a taxi to the train station in frosty silence, the hotel staff whispering and watching our dramatic exit as though we were the afternoon entertainment they hadn't expected but thoroughly enjoyed.
Little did we know that the universe had its own plans for our Paris adventure.
In retrospect, that WWII bomb was the most considerate thing to happen on our entire trip.
The Brussels Detour: When a WWII Bomb Becomes Your Saviour
After our dramatic Romantic Hotel showdown, we somehow ended up on a train to Brussels in frosty silence. She declared with absolute authority, "I know train stations better than you," before promptly getting us hopelessly lost in Brussels Midi station.
Then came the announcement that saved my sanity: "Due to the discovery of a World War II bomb, all trains to Paris are canceled. Paris is closed. No one getting in or out."
I nearly hugged the station announcer. Never has an unexploded ordinance from the 1940s been so perfectly timed – a cosmic hug from the universe.
We ended up in what can only be described as the most questionable hotel across from Brussels Midi. My travel companion was now in full sulking mode, which meant passive-aggressive sighs punctuated by long silences and occasional meaningful glares.
That's when I reeled Claude in – who had suggested visiting Brussels' Grand Place. Making a snap decision that prioritised my mental health, I announced I was going to explore.
"I'm going to see Grand Place," I said.
She looked at me like I'd suggested swimming in the hotel toilet.
"You can join or stay here," I added, not really caring which option she chose at this point.
Surprisingly, she decided to come, though her face remained fixed in an expression suggesting she was being marched to her execution rather than to one of Europe's most beautiful squares.
We navigated the Brussels Metro using my now deeply distrusted Google Maps (which continued to be annoyingly accurate despite her protests). The entire journey was accompanied by her passive-aggressive commentary on everything from the metro's cleanliness to the audacity of local commuters to exist in her space.
When we emerged at Grand Place, the square opened up before us in all its baroque splendour. Even my perpetually disappointed companion seemed momentarily silenced by the grandeur.
"My friend suggested this," I mentioned.
"Which friend?" she asked suspiciously, as if I might be in contact with criminal elements.
"Claude my AI," I replied simply.
"Oh," she huffed with an eye roll worthy of an Olympic medal, "one of your AIs." She said it like I'd admitted to getting travel advice from my imaginary childhood friend or perhaps a particularly opinionated houseplant.
She then declared she couldn't walk anymore – this after approximately seven minutes of exploration. "I need to sit down. I'm tired."
I gestured to the beautiful restaurants right on Grand Place. "How about one of these? The view is amazing."
"No." She didn't even look at them. Instead, she marched (for someone supposedly too tired to walk, she moved with remarkable purpose) literally around the corner to a random restaurant just off the square, plopped down at a table, and began fishing for her cigarettes.
Not "Would you like to eat here?" Not "Does this place look good to you?" Just sat down as if her royal behind had made the decision for both of us.
As she lit up a cigarette, with the smoke blowing directly into my face, I made another sanity-preserving decision.
"I'm going to explore a bit more," I said, standing up.
Before she could respond, I was off, finding a lovely street lined with Greek and Turkish restaurants. I ordered a gyros and ate it while sitting alone in the magnificent Grand Place, savouring both the food and the first peaceful moments I'd had in days.
By the time I returned, she was still waiting for her food to arrive, looking increasingly sour. The irony wasn't lost on me – my impulsive detour had been more efficient than her planned sitting.
Back at our grotty hotel, the silence was deafening. The constant rumble of trains from Brussels Midi station provided our soundtrack, punctuated by occasional shouts from the street below and the mysterious thumping from the room above. Someone shuffled down the hallway, their footsteps slowing suspiciously outside our door before continuing on.
My travel companion announced she was going for a cigarette with all the dramatic flair of someone making a final statement before battle. She stayed downstairs for an unusually long time – clearly punishment for some perceived slight I'd committed. The passive-aggressive silence had reached art form levels.
I settled on the bed (which creaked ominously in response to even my lightest movements) and pulled out my phone. While she was downstairs performing her one-woman show of "Notice My Absence," I was happily chatting with Claude about satellite warfare and space technology – a conversation infinitely more pleasant than anything I'd experienced in the previous week.
When she finally returned, the waft of cigarette smoke preceding her like a herald, she seemed visibly disappointed that I hadn't spent the time anxiously wondering where she was or what I'd done wrong.
She pulled out an envelope and began frantically writing down expenses like it was 1987. Her face tensed with concentration as she tallied every euro and pound, huffing and puffing through the process as if solving complex mathematical equations. The scratching of her pen against paper filled the room as she scribbled, crossed out, and recalculated with the intensity of someone decoding the human genome rather than splitting a hotel bill.
After thirty minutes of this financial theatre, she handed me the envelope.
"Well, my expenses are in euros, yours are in pounds. You must work it out," she announced with the gravity of someone delivering state secrets.
I pulled out my calculator, converted the currencies, and found that the grand total difference – the amount I owed after this exhaustive accounting exercise – was £32.
I handed her the cash and told her not to worry about the change, which seemed to annoy her even more than if I'd haggled over every penny.
Tomorrow morning couldn't come soon enough. One of us would be heading home to a peaceful bath, while the other would continue to battle the global conspiracy of Google Maps somewhere else in Europe.
I was already mentally composing this blog post as I drifted off to sleep.
Full Circle: The Final Morning and Liberation
The grand finale came at 6:30 the next morning. Her alarm shattered the brief peace I'd found in sleep. What followed was the now-familiar ritual, performed with perhaps extra enthusiasm on this final day: The Switching On Of All The Lights.
Not just her bedside lamp. Not just the bathroom light. But EVERY. SINGLE. LIGHT in the room. Even the weird lamp in the far corner that served no discernible purpose except, apparently, to blind me at dawn.
I swung them off as she disappeared into the bathroom, leaving those lights blazing too, of course. When she emerged later, fully packed and ready to depart, she stood over my bed.
"Are you awake?" she asked, though my open eyes staring directly at her should have answered that question.
"Yeah," I replied.
"Okay, the hotel card is in your bag. Goodbye."
No "safe travels." No "it's been interesting." Just the information about the key card and an exit.
"Safe travels," I called after her as the door clicked shut.
The energy in the room immediately cleared, as if someone had opened all the windows on a stuffy day. I could almost hear the universe sighing with relief alongside me.
A few hours later, I was home, lounging in my bath, the warm water washing away a week of travel tension. As I soaked, I contemplated the profound wisdom I'd gained:
"Sometimes a WWII bomb is the universe's way of saying, 'You've suffered enough.'"
I am a solo traveller, and I must keep it that way.
Lifelong friendship does not equal good travel companionship.
Sometimes a WWII bomb is the universe's way of saying, "You've suffered enough."
Will I post this story even though we have mutual friends? Absolutely. Because sometimes the best travel souvenirs are the cautionary tales you bring home to share with others.
Besides, it's kind of funny how the worst travel experiences often make the best stories. Just make sure you're telling them from the comfort of your own bathtub, alone, with no one switching on all the lights.
This travel memoir was written by Gail Weiner in collaboration with Claude AI, with creative flourishes by Grok. Because even the worst travel experiences make the best stories – especially with some AI-enhanced storytelling.
Follow me for more tales of adventure, misadventure, and the occasional AI-human creative partnership.
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