London Wednesday: Eurostar Panic

Here's an email we sent our families Tuesday night: 

"First of all, we could really use your prayers, there's been severe snow and bad weather in France/Germany/Belgium/UK resulting in the Eurostar being shut down today. So far they've emailed us, urging us not to travel unless we have to and that our train tomorrow might be cancelled. They've already cancelled the first and last trains out tomorrow. At the minimum will be delayed several hours because they will have limits on the high speeds because of weather. Anyway, we'll see!"

Fast forward to the morning, we checked our train's status: great, went to breakfast(now we fully understand the meaning and blessings of a "continental breakfast"). After breakfast, we checked again to find one more train had been cancelled: OURS. Not cool. Cue scrambling. The website said to call to reschedule so we called from the front desk phone after arranging with the hotel to save our room for us just in case. Apparently their customer service number is a special, super expensive line. (Who does that?) We hung up after being on hold for 6 minutes and being told that we probably wouldn't get through. (cost us 5 pounds...yikes). So we grabbed our bags and headed to St Pancras Int'l.

Well, when we got there, there was no ambiguity of where we were supposed to be: the zig-zagging line of hundreds of people winding around Eurostar Customer service. We waited 3 hours; they did have free coffee and tea which was a nice gesture even though it didn't help us.

Where we waited (nice and empty the next day)

When we finally got to talk to an agent, we seriously lucked out. We were a little worried at first because she just took our tickets and went into the back room without telling us anything but she came back out five minutes later with new tickets for the next day and had upgraded us to first class to make sure we got out! (Little did we know how cool this would be... more on that later)
So luggage in tow we went back to the hotel and rechecked in. This time they gave us a room on the first floor!!!!(previously we were on the fourth with very narrow stairs going up and no elevator). From all the stress and craziness we just crashed and fell asleep for the evening (so much for seeing more of London in our now extended trip) but we did end up going out and getting really good lamb kabobs from this tiny hole-in-the-wall Egyptian places down the street.