The Blue Train

Paris Gare De Lyon station is an adventure.

First, we attempted to reserve overnight train tickets to Sallanches for Friday evening (as mentioned in the last post). However Easter Monday is a holiday all over Europe, so everyone travels over this extremely popular three day weekend, and we weren´t able to get tickets. Instead we got reservations for a TGV set to leave at 9:30 the next morning, Saturday.

Due to the number of trains arriving ever minute to such a large location, the gate at which each train is berthed is usually not announced until 20 minutes previous to its departure, and up to that point you only know whether it will be a 'blue' gate (the lettered gates) or a 'yellow' one (the numbered gates). This makes it an adventure finding your train, kind of like an Easter egg hunt, only without any of the fun.

And of course, in keeping with our extremely erratic luck in Paris, our train was not assigned a gate number until 5 minutes after it was scheduled to depart, at which point it felt as if half the population of Gare De Lyon (a station that holds easily 2000 people at that time of day) attempted to board the train in a 3 minute time frame.

So we gathered our bags and hustled our way along with the herd (Mooo!) onto the train. It was a very nice setup; the TGV took good care of us on our way to Sallanches. Impressively, despite the fact that we left 15 minutes late, and we stopped twice due to unexplained technical difficulties, we managed to arrive just 10 minutes after our scheduled time.

And there, we met my family.