Antoin,
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 03:45:20PM +0200, Antoin Verschuren wrote:
Paris Charles de Gaulle airport
Is a reasonable alternative if your airline doesn't do Amsterdam or Brussels.
The train journey to Maastricht will take you approx 3,5 hours, and includes
2 stopovers.
First from Paris CDG to Paris Nord by RER, then take the TGV to Brussels, and
then to Maastricht:
Aeroport Charles de Gaulle 1--Paris Nord
Paris Nord-- Bruxelles-Sud/Midi
Bruxelles-Sud/Midi--Maastricht
There are many TGVs that go directly from CDG to brussels which cuts
out one connection and if your plane arrives at the right time, cuts
down the trip to 3 hours and 10 minutes which puts it in the same
order of magnitude as traveling from Amsterdam and has the advantage
of not having to travel at all on the congested dutch railway system
(and in fact one could argue whether you ever set foot on dutch soil ;-))
Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
So suppose you're flying from SFO with Northwest, leaving on friday.
Land at 10:30 on saturday. (Results based on doing all of this the
same week this year.) I don't think you'll make the 11:00 train, so it
would have to be the 11:30 or 12:00 one, which gets you to the
Maastricht train station at 14:04 or 14:34 with 6 minutes to change
trains in Utrecht. So far so good.
Having flown this route many times, it is entirely possible to catch
the 11:00am train if you didn't check in, and even if you checked in,
more often than not this flight and other transatlantic flights arrive
early and you can also make it.
Also, if the meeting was held in Amsterdam, you would have still
needed to catch a train to Amsterdam. Catching the train to Maastricht
from Schiphol airport would not have caused an increase in difficulty
level compared to a train to Amsterdam. The only difference would have
been the longer travel time.
I agree that Maastricht is not an ideal location from a travel time
perspective and that locations like Paris are a better choice if
venues and sponsors happened to be available. On the other hand it is
really not that hard to get to Maastricht and certainly worth the few
extra travel hours compared to some of the cold and icy locations that
the IETF has visited in the recent past.
And when comparing it to Dublin, getting from the airport to the
meeting venue might actually not be much of a difference time wise
thanks to the horrible traffic situation around Dublin (unless you
were one of the lucky few who managed to into one of the black
helicopters).
David Kessens
---
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf