That Sucked!!
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Thank god that we had gone to the station last night and sorted our seats on the train. Only one issue – we had thought that after our last train that smoking on trains in Spain must not be allowed. Yes that was a bit of a assumption but all I’m saying is that it wasn’t at the top of the list and we thought that at the least it would be an option. As you can probably guess we had smoking tickets on a 7 hour train ride – oh shit!
Getting up at 10 to check out at 11 we pulled ourselves together and headed for the door with grumbling tummies. The hotel offered breakfast but at a stupid price so we gave that a miss and stopped of at a café on the way to the metro station. What an awesome start to the day we both got toast (super, thick toast with jam) and drinks. It was so good I had to order more toast leaving feeling like a fatso. We spent a couple of hours at the train station, before finally getting our Platform number and heading for the train… it looked like it had rolled straight out of the sixties in some weird time warp. It was very well maintained and had every convenience including television, albeit a very old one. Maarty reckons that it looked as though it had been used for military purposes at some time, many years ago. The seats were comfy enough though. After leaving the station we quickly decided that 7 hours in a smoking carriage was a very long time and found that there were a couple of seats in the next carriage. The conductor didn’t seem very impressed when he found us in the wrong seats but soon came back and said we could have some other ones. Basically we bunny hopped around the carriage as people got on and off the train. Have to say though, that it was without a doubt the slowest train I have ever been on. I don’t think it even hit 100kms an hour the whole seven hours! All in all it wasn’t too bad though. When we jumped on our connecting train we got a bit of a shock though… we had been told that although it wasn’t a sleeper, the seats would go back and it would be comfy enough. Wrong! The seats didn’t go back at all, meaning that you had to sit upright! Fortunately we got on at the start of the line, and were lucky enough to scab a second lot of seats. Every time the train stopped I expected to get kicked back to our shared one but I picked the right one for once and managed to have 2 seats to myself the whole way, as did Maarty. Maarty slept pretty well, praising his earplugs again! My sleep was very interrupted though and they didn’t turn off the lights the whole way, which was a bit weird! Oh well, we’re not travelling for much longer and I don’t think there’ll be anymore overnight trains.
We got up to the announcement that we were about to arrive, and wandered off the train for our first look at Paris! At 6am it was still dark and nothing was open other than a couple of coffee shops, so decided to have croissants and hot chocolate (the coffee machine was broken) at the station. We had arrived in at Montparnasse Station, which unfortunately although big, didn’t have a hotel booking place. I decided we might be better off getting a Metro to Lyon, which seems to be where most of the trains come and go from, but the hotel booking place there apparently isn’t open on Sundays… what to do? Maarty decided that we should pop outside and just walk into hotels in the immediate area. We quickly found (the first hotel we tried, in fact) a reasonably priced (for Paris) 2 star hotel that had a room available immediately. Et voila! We just wanted some sleep…
posted by Maarty @ 12:00 pm,
