You can't leave Paris

4/21
(5/20)

You can’t leave Paris!

We had a few days between our week in Paris and our expected arrival in London. We knew we wanted to spend a few days in non-Paris France, and figured some of our new Parisian friends could give us some good advice.
Our Parisian friends did help us, or tried to. Invariably when the topic came up, someone would give a great suggestion of a town to visit, all would agree that’s a wonderful place to go…
Unless you want to try THIS place.
Yeah, that’s a great place to visit too!
Oh, and there’s always that other place.
Yeah, that other place is great! Hey, so is YET ANOTHER place!

So we had four or five group conversations (!) that seemed as though they were going to be helpful, but turned out to be not so much useful as simply a list of all of the cities and towns in France.

Finally, we picked Avignon. It’s a town in the south of France. You know how we love our cities with walls. It’s proximate to more-expensive Marseilles, where we ended up taking a day trip, and it’s the seat of the Avignon Papacy, and you know how I love those political / religious schisms.

It looked for a bit as though we weren’t going to get the hell out of Paris. We had so few problems traveling that it ultimately made sense that they all conspired to give us a single snaggy day.

The first snag occurred when we tried to make our train reservations to Avignon from Paris. We had Eurail passes which acted as our tickets throughout, but on the TGV (Trains de Grande Vitiesse, AKA Trains of Large Speed) one needs to make reservations before hand, and some routes, (like Paris to Avignon) are only served by TGV.

We hadn’t had any problems with same-day reservations previously, but on this Monday 4/21 our TGV desk agent seemed certain that there simply wasn’t ANY WAY we were going to be able to get to Avignon before Thursday.

Well, we’ve spent too much time traveling on trains to believe anyone who tells us that it’s impossible to get to one location from another location. I’d be lying if I said the hour we spent on various lines and at various computer kiosks wasn’t stressful, but eventually we pieced together an alternate route to Avignon that got us to our destination hours, not days, later than our original plan.
When we landed with the exact same TGV desk agent to purchase reservations for our alternate path journey, he apologized for not having though to check that route himself.
Thanks dick.
The extended Paris layover allowed us to explore the Jardins des Plantes et le Jardins Luxemborg which, by the way, has the coolest playground in the world! Not to mention the kids sailing little boats in the big fountain.

We’d dropped our rucksacks in the train station lockers in order to take our little excursion. Unfortunately we lingered by the boats in the fountain for just a bit too long and after hustling back down the LONGEST STREET IN PARIS we made the locker-room in EXACTLY enough time to grab our bags and make our train.

The locker “key” was actually a ticket to reinsert, and to keep that ticket undamaged, I stowed it in my passport.
Despite my keeping the ticket sans fold or wrinkle, the LED display informed me, in Francais, that THIS TICKET IS DAMAGED AND CANNOT BE READ.
What?
Shit!?!
There is a man who works the locker room. My terrible high school French was made worse by my eagerness to not miss the train route we’d gerry rigged. I’m sure to him my sentences sounded something like:
“Key not work”
“Please thank you help”
“Luggage in box stuck”

I’ve never seen Jenn so red and pissed as when the attendant lazily began to disassemble the entire mechanism of the locker. I swore over and over that I simply could NOT have damaged the key card, but I think she still believes that I somehow crumpled, sweated upon, or chewed it up.

We finally retrieved our bags, minutes to go! Following the signs to the correct platform and we ascend the wrong stairway! Why is have they hidden track 10? If we were already in London, I’d be sure that this was some sort of Harry Potter hidden magical platform. Down these stairs, up those! Ah, there’s the track, simply through that glad door and…
Just to add insult to panic, I chose the door of the set that was locked. In my rush I didn’t quite understand what had happened until I’d been knocked back a few feet.

We made the train with a breath of relief. Nothing that happened in the sequence was unusual for the type of travel we were doing, except that it all happened at the same time. Generally our actual travel was event and anecdote free.
Thank the goodness!