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@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf