Day twenty-eight: Home again, home again, jiggety-jig!

Ok, I take it back. There is a certain something quite nice about being whisked through the French countryside at high speed, knowing that you're on your way home and that you've realised there's no point trying to delay the inevitable.

You might as well just get it over and done with as quickly as possible, like pulling off a plaster.

We were up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at an ungodly hour, our Sistema boxes packed last night and now ready with salads and puddings, to get our lift to Rotterdam Centraal. We arrived with plenty of time to spare so sat and drank coffee in the lounge and enjoyed the calm before embarking on one last final push to get home.

Our 10:10 9224 InterCity to Brussels Central left on time but quickly became full of people who struggled to understand the concept of a quiet carriage. The noisy part of the journey was mercifully short and before we knew it we'd put our bags into the lockers at Brussels Centraal and were being amazed at exactly how much there is to do right outside the station.

We had roughly two hours to explore, so we did the two things I remembered about Brussels: La Grand Place – I guess the grand is masculine because it describes the people who went there and not the square itself – and the Manneken-Pis. It was quickly decided that we had done enough walking, so we found ourselves a little bar not too far from the station and had some refreshments – Floris White – until the time came for us to board the next train.

Our train onwards from Brussels was the SNCB 14:38 Intercity to Coutrai. I checked this multiple times because we literally could not afford to miss this train as we were booked on the last TGV direct TGV out of Lille.

The journey took a little under two hours. The air-conditioning was struggling and only one toilet was available, but the problem with the air-conditioning was remedied to a certain degree by shutting the doors at either end of the compartment and closing the open windows .

After a few stops, we were the only people left in the carriage and felt like we had the whole train to ourselves, so we moved around trying to seats where the aircon was seemed to be making more of an effort. The sun was determined to cook everyone on the train, especially if they were sitting on the side of the train that caught the sun, so this was a mostly futile exercise. We spent the most of the journey panting.

At 16:11 we got off at Mouscron – the last station in Belgium – for our final connection. There wasn't much to do or see during our 19-minute change, but I did take a moment to look at the exterior of the building to see if was any nicer than the interior. It is! There is a resemblance, passing, admittedly – squint, really hard – to Zagreb Glavni Kolodvor that brought the whole thing back to me. So "hurrah!" for Mouscron. It made the inevitable slightly less daunting.

The 16:30 to Lille Flandres was empty when we boarded but became packed at the next station. Not even the guards understood the concept of the quiet carriage or bothered checking our tickets, but the air-conditioning was triumphant in working to keep the place lovely and cold, so we really didn't care any more; in our minds, and in the scale of things, we were riding a tram to the station to get the train home.

Originally opened in 1848 as the Gare de Lille, the station has been Lille Flandres since the Lille Europe opened in 1993. The façade was originally the Embarcadère at the Gare du Nord in Paris. When it became apparent it was too small, it was disassembled, transported from Paris and reassembled piece by piece to front the new station. The first floor and clock are additions by the company who originally owned the railway, made to satisfy the people of Lille. It has a Marks and Spencer.

I chose Lille because, like Strasbourg, the service is direct so you can limit yourself to only one set of compulsory reservation fees – thanks, SNCF – and they are the only two stations with direct international connections out of France without compulsory reservations that are served by my nearest TGV in Angoulême; you can get to Switzerland and Belgium with only one compulsory 10€ reservation. That said, I only made the compulsory 10€ reservations yesterday; they were still 107€ cheaper than a last-minute TGV ticket in first. So thanks, SNCF!

As we only had 25 minutes to spare, both remain unexplored but deserve a longer connection next time. The station in Lille is suitably pretty and was the perfect place to board our final TGV home.

The 17:16 TGV 5240 left from platform eight, which is part of the original station. We were on a TGV Duplex – one of the "lots of people" trainsets with the old armchair interior – and I'd booked us on the top deck so we could get a good view of the world as it flew by at 300kph.

I took a certain satisfaction from knowing that we were over-taking traffic on the motorway, and was really happy to see the "quiet zone" indicators that even the argumentative Spanish family on their way home from Disneyland Paris finally settled down to respect.

The problem with photographing things from TGVs is the frequency of things that whoosh past just as you press the button, and the propensity for trees to suddenly block your view when you see something you must photograph. There may be a market for an "unexpected blurry tree in the way" calendar.

The guard informed us that they don't punch tickets on TGVs any more, but agreed to give us a stamp in the final box of our travel diary as a souvenir. There was for a moment, in Brussels, a sudden urge to get on another train and do it all again – "shall we just stay on and go round again?" – but reality and work beckon.

I'm definitely going round again.