Assemini We set our alarms very early to get up, pack the car and head to Basel, Switzerland to return our rental car. Since we were so early, we encountered little traffic on the way to and on the motorway and arrived in a Basel in plenty of time to pick up our train e-tickets for the train to Paris. We hopped a taxi over to the train station and Mike went to one of the ticket printing stations. Though he tried several times, he had no luck printing tickets. So, he got in line at the ticket window. After waiting his turn, he had the misfortune of getting assistance from an unhelpful agent. After many minutes, she informed him he had to pick up his tickets in the country where he had made the reservations. Mike made the reservations while we were on the Rhine River near Strasbourg, so would we have to get them in France or Germany? Fortunately, however, we were able to get tickets on the TGV to Paris leaving at 12:34pm and arriving at 3:37pm. The agent told Mike to cancel his previous reservations. We still aren’t sure that it would have been impossible to get our original tickets, especially if we used the e-ticket number. Â After all, what good is buying a ticket on the internet, getting e-tickets, if they can’t be printed at the originating point of your destination?
http://punchdrunksoul.com/kaylenkelley/kaylens-episode/ With tickets in hand, we retreated to the brasserie in the station, for coffee and to access Mike’s Europe Rail account to cancel our other tickets. That effort, despite the claims of free Wi-Fi took over an hour.
We returned to the main station area to wait for the platform number of our train to be posted. When it came up, we headed up the escalator to find the platform. There was a local train sitting at the platform and marked on the sign, so rather than descend to the platform before the TGV was posted (we had that issue where the track changed at the last minute once before), we waited. The local train pulled out and the sign changed to our train.
We descended to the platform, checked the electronic message board and determined that second class was in the front of the train. The posted train configuration on the bulletin board showed just the reverse. We decided to pay attention to the electronic version not the paper version! We were assigned seats in car 11, the train came to a stop in front of us at car 17. Lesson number two for the day, there is a small section of second class seats at the rear of the last first class car, intended for those traveling with bicycles. We were assigned the seats that fold up to make room for bicycles, probably the most uncomfortable seats on the TGV. There were 16 seats in this tiny closed off section and the temperature quickly shot up. But never a conductor did we see to ask to make adjustments! Three hours later, we arrived at Gare Lyon in Paris!
We caught a cab to our apartment, 20Â Montmorency 75003, a great floor plan with six huge French windows overlooking a courtyard. Two were in the living room, two in the den, two in one of the bedrooms. The den, living room, kitchen, dining were all open. Each of the two bedrooms had its own bathroom, one with tub and shower, other with shower! We settled in, made an emergency grocery list for the morning, and headed out to explore the neighborhood.
Our small bakery is down the street, grocery store is a short walk away. We strolled over to Les Halles, stopped at Pere Tranquille for a before dinner drink. We headed on to rue Montorgueil for dinner at Cafe du Centre. We had a rain shower or two, but walked back to the apartment in clear weather. We went to bed fairly early since we had gotten up early for our travel day!
