The Almost Disastrous Tale of The King’s Day Train Journey

“What day do your parents arrive?” my wife asked. She was sitting at the dining table, arranging various important dates and noting them down in our family calendar. She is very organized. Sometimes there are different coloured pens involved.

“Err… Hang on. I’ll check.” I am not so well organized so I had to scroll through the emails on my phone as I lounged on the sofa. “The 27th,” I replied once I had found it.

“Of April?” she asked.

I quickly looked at the screen again because I had not taken in that bit of information the first time. “Umm… Yes.”

“I think you might want to give them a call.” Suspiciously she had not written anything down yet.

“Why?” I asked.

She told me why.

“Oh no. I think I better give them a call,” I replied.

My parents come to visit us from London every half year or so. Rather than flying or taking the boat they decide to travel by train. Early in the morning they leave London, travel via the tunnel from Dover to Calais, change trains at Brussels, travel to Rotterdam, change again onto a train to Zwolle where they will make their final change to travel up to Friesland… And this time they had decided to do all of that on King’s Day (aka Koningsdag). They were going to travel the entire length of the country on a day when most of the country has been drinking since 8am.

“Hi Mum. It’s me. I’m just calling because I think you might want to change your travel date.” It wasn’t our usual greeting but I couldn’t help feeling a sense of urgency about the whole thing (despite it still being a few weeks away).

“Oh. Hello. What do you mean?” she asked, confused.

“Well… We just realized that you are traveling on King’s Day. It’s going to be very busy here.” It was a bit of an understatement but that is how we Brits tend to break bad news.

It wasn’t my parents fault. They couldn’t have realized they were booking their tickets on the craziest day of the year in The Netherlands. They had no reason to note down the date since they had their own monarch (who organized much tamer parties, if at all).

I heard my Dad in the background, asking questions, obviously wondering what was going on. My Mum quickly relayed my message and I heard some more discussion before she returned to the phone.

“Yeah, Stuart. The only problem is we’ve already paid for the tickets. We’ll just take the risk. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Maybe I had understated it too much. I tried again. “But it won’t be nice trying to travel on the train during King’s Day. It’ll be extremely busy.”

“I know what you mean,” she replied, “It was very busy last time. Your father and I could not get a seat next to each other.”

She was referring to their return trip from their Christmas visit. It had been the day most of the country had returned to work. Sure, it had been busy but at least everyone involved had been sober. My Mother was kind of missing the point that on that day they had been able to find seats, even if they were not next to each other. On King’s Day they would be lucky if they ended up on the same train.

They would spend the whole day, crammed into overpopulated train carriages, without a seat, trying to keep a hold of their suitcases while loudly serenaded by a hoard of drunk Dutch people with Frans Bauer’s greatest hits. That is if they were even able to get onto a train or even into a train station.

“It’ll be worse than that,” I started to explain. It was time to be very clear about how terrible it would be. “I really can’t stress how much of a bad idea it is to travel on King’s Day. It’ll be hell.”

“It’ll cost us extra to change our tickets though,” my Mum replied.

“How much?”

“Sixty Euros each.”

“Trust me. It will be worth it. Please.”

“I’ll have a word with your father.”

After the phone call I was worried that I still had not fully conveyed the chaos and hell traveling on King’s Day would be. I quickly went online and typed the phrase ‘King’s Day train station’ into youtube. The first video I found showed Amsterdam central as one mass of pushing and shoving orange clad Dutch people. Even the police in the video had more or less given up.

I sent the video to my parents. They called back ten minutes later to tell us they had changed their tickets.