A Completely Disastrous Travel Day in France
There's nothing like a miserable travel day to humble you when everything you worked so hard to plan goes completely ca-ca... And today was one of them. The day started when I misread the bus schedule showing two buses to Ales. One at 8:30 am, one at 9:00 am. Standing on the bus corner and waiting for the early bus that didn't materialize, I read a little further and realized that bus only operated on school days. Hello...it's summer vacation. No worries...we still had all day. One Euro each for the the 55-minute trip to Ales stopping at the train station. Once there, decided to get in line and pay for TGV seats to Paris instead of waiting until Nimes. After all, we did have an hour between trains...
Our turn with the SNCF (French Railway) person. There isn't ONE SEAT on any TGV heading to Paris Charles de Gaulle. There isn't ONE SEAT on any TGV going to Paris Gare de Lyon and there isn't ONE SEAT on any other TGV train from Avignon-Paris, Marseille-Paris, Aix en Provence-Paris, nothing if we change trains in Lyon...we are in deep dogey doo-doo! Why? This is the weekend that most of France starts traveling on their annual summer vacation! If we had First Class tickets, there were seats available but our passes are Second Class.
Forty-five minutes of talking and there is only one option, and not really an option...this was it. A 2:34 pm train to Clermont Ferraud, changing to another train going to Lyon, changing to the last train heading to Paris Gare de Lyon. This would get us into Paris at 11:00 pm tonight. From Paris Gare de Lyon, we'd then have to take the RER out to the airport, hail a taxi to the Ibis Hotel (the complimentary hotel buses stop running by then) in order to make our flight home the next day. Instead of a 3-1/2 hour train journey from Nimes direct to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and a planned visit to Nimes, we had marathon train rides to look forward to. This sucked...
Three hours until the train from Ales to Clermont Ferraud (and no chance to visit Nimes), we left the baggage at the train station and walked around Ales. The consolation was a fabulous indoor food market where we bought some goodies and fruit for the train ride. Figured we'd have enough time at the station in Clermont Ferraud to buy dinner sandwiches to-go. Right....
The train into Clermont Ferraud was late and palpitations worrying about missing the next train to Lyon. Twenty minutes late, we yanked the bags down one flight of stairs and up a flight of stairs to another platform with only seven minutes to spare. No time to buy sandwiches but grateful that we were on the train to Paris with actual seats. The miserable day continued.... In the Gare de Lyon at 11:00 pm, changed our train ticket into an RER ticket, took RER Line A one stop to Chatelet, off the train, across the platform and waited for RER B to materialize heading for Charles de Gaulle Airport. There must have been hundreds of people waiting on this one platform heading for the suburbs after an evening in Paris. This is no exaggeration. When the first train (not the CDG one) actually appeared, a madhouse as all these people crammed into the train so tightly that it took a while for the doors to close. It resembled one of those Japanese train platforms where they have actual "train stuffers" to push people into the cars.
More waiting. Forty-five minutes later, the last Charles de Gaulle train of the evening roared into the station. Short story. In bed at 2:00 am. Up the next morning at 7:30 am and the nightmare continued with trying to get on the complimentary shuttle bus from the Ibis Hotel to Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2. The buses run every 15 minutes and make the rounds of many hotels. Do I have to tell you that these buses were wall-to-wall people? When the next bus showed up, we forced our way on along with others (it was every person for themselves), stood on luggage in the aisle and used our backs to keep other people's luggage from falling on us for the 10-minute ride to the airport.
Long security lines (the day before security people were on strike), plane delays, three terrible movies and we were home.
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