Trains

Ever been on one of your children's school excursions where the travelling itself is the excursion and the fun?  Well, this last week or so has been just like that, a travel excursion where each day presented another interesting challenge about how to get from A to B, and what to see (both anticipated and unexpected) along the way.  It has indeed been fun.


We started in Madrid and I booked train tickets to get to France.  The original idea was to get into France and then hire a car and drive without much planning nor aim and then make sure we get to the Roscoff ferry port in Brittany to catch the boat to Plymouth on the 9th April.  However, three days of driving on the wrong side of the road in Spain gave me other ideas and I lost the enthusiasm to negotiate all the roundabouts and freeways and slip roads.  A phone app called trainline.eu came to the rescue and this made it easy to plot a path through France and end up in the right place for our ferry.


With this app we booked and bought train tickets to, in turn, Hendaye to Rennes; Rennes to Bayeux; Bayeux to Vernon/Giverny; Vernon to Caen via Rouen and Lisieux; Caen to Roscoff.  We are now good at catching the French trains and can hum the SNCF train station announcement jingle in our sleep.  I must say, the French and Spanish train systems, the information available on the screens, the facilities at the stations, the ticketing systems, are outstanding.


I find there are lots of things to worry about with trains.  For example, in case you are about to catch trains and are calm and comfortable, I'll give you a list of worry options to change your disposition:

• You buy a ticket and don't print it
• You print your ticket but lose it
• You forget to validate your ticket
• You cannot find the right platform
• The train doesn't arrive
• The train arrives but you are at the bus station
• The train arrives but doesn't open its doors
• The train opens its doors but then closes them on you while you are half way through the door
• The train arrives, opens its doors, you are there at the right place to jump on the train but an elephant is on the train and is blocking the door so you can't get on
• The train takes a wrong turn at the roundabout and ends up in Santiago, Chile, not Santiago de Compostela
• You are late for the train and the lift doesn't work and you have to carry your suitcases up the stairs and there's an elephant stuck in the way
• You get on the wrong carriage and cannot find your allocated seat
• You eventually find your seat but is occupied by an elephant who had eventually managed to get up the stairs

See?  There are many different reasons to worry about catching trains.  Only a few of the above proved to be more than just imaginary worries but all in all, we caught every train and each train made its way successfully to its nominated destination.

What is especially fun about the train travel excursion is that the actual catching of each train was a little fun challenge in itself, each successful boarding a little win.  An unfamiliar journey to nowhere we have been to before which on the strength of the information on a ticket and following a series of numbers means that we get off the train and into another new unfamiliar world: First Rennes, then Bayeux, then Vernon etc. etc.


Enjoying the journeys here ... tell you more about the destinations next.