Category Archives: gare de lyon

Monday 26th September 2011 – I REMEMBER YESTERDAY …

… saying that I didn’t want to come home.

And had I known what the flight was going to be like, I wouldn’t have done.

I’m not the best air traveller in the world, but I’m much better than some of the people on board who spent almost the entire flight screaming as we were tossed from one patch of turbulence to another all the way across the Atlantic.

The worst part about the flight though was that I didn’t receive my vegan breakfast – and how upset was I about that? That was a huge disappointment, although no complaints about the chick pea curry the night before.

Passing through the Immigration was fairly painless for a change. But the armed soldiers patrolling the airport wasn’t very pleasant to see. We all know about soldiers and their accurate rate of fire. A suicide-bomber pops up his head and 50 civilians are killed in a spray of inaccurate machine-gunning.

And it seems that they can’t spell “AREA” either. We all have to go to the “Baggage AERA” for our luggage.

The airport might have been fairly painless but the journey through Paris to the Gare de Lyon wasn’t. I’m really going to have to find an alternative to this route. Dragging my huge suitcase through the crowds and through the metro and the RER is no pleasure, believe me.

Nothing exciting happened on the train back – which makes quite a change after last year’s adventures and Terry met me at the railway station at Riom.

I fuelled up Terry’s car and then he took me back to his place, where Liz very kindly offered me a bed for the night, for which I was extremely grateful.

0

Tuesday 30th August 2011 – DAY ONE OF MY VOYAGE

I’m not sure if this should actually count as Day One because firstly, there wasn’t much of it and secondly, I didn’t actually leave the country. It was however they day that I hit the road (or rather hit the rails) and so for that reason I’ve included it as a fair candidate.

Having said that though, I did actually hit the road rather early. I was all washed up, cleaned up, tidied up (well, sort-of) and on the road for 09:45 because today is the day that Liz and I record the Radio Anglais programmes for the month of September. We did the Radio Tartasse sessions in the morning and then I drove Caliburn down to Liz’s and left him there, piling myself and the baggage into Liz’s voiture for the journey down to Gerzat and the Radio Arverne sessions.

When they were over she heaved me out at the railway station at Riom and that was that. And only a wait of 75 minutes for the train. Good job there’s a coffee machine here.

railway locomotive riom paris gare de lyon franceThis is the locomotive that pulled my train for Paris Gare de Lyon.

I sat next to a girl on the train up and we had a healthy conversation for at least 10 minutes before we worked out that we were both British. She was from Inverness and a student at St Andrews studying French for Scientists. She was spending a year’s exchange living in the language but she’d been in Aurillac for a month house-and-dog sitting.

Her family lives in the wilds and they have no mains electricity – just solar panels and wind turbines and so we had a good chat about that and I gave her a card.

We had the usual struggle across Paris with my giant suitcase and there has to be a better way to go to the airport than this – hitting the city in the evening rush hour with swarms of people and escalators out of order and miles to walk. I’m going to have to resolve this somehow.

At the airport, I dunno where this blasted shuttle bus has gone to – I have to wait about a year for it to turn up. And then by the time that I’ve sorted out everything at the hotel and gone for a walk, the only restaurant in this village here is closed. It only opens Thursday Friday and Saturday evenings and closes at 21:30. So that’s no use to me.

Nothing to eat tonight then. I hope that the rest of my voyage is better than this.

0