How I ended up in Paris (entirely by accident)

[Enorama 1,980]

I've told bits and pieces of this story in Discord, but have never actually gotten the whole thing down in one place, so I figured I would in case even 1 person is interested in reading it.

 

I spent September-December 2019 in Germany for school, my girlfriend came out to visit me in mid-December around exam time, then we left to travel a bit "on our way home" as it were. The original plan was to do a bit of small towns in Germany (Trier, Koblenz, Sankt Wendel), head out to Marseille, and finish off with Barcelona and Madrid before flying back to Winnipeg. We had all the travel and accommodations booked and everything seemed hunky dory. All the way up until Christmas Day, as we're sitting at a friend's place in Sankt Wendel (middle of nowhere, Germany) and I double check our reservations for trains the next day. That's when I saw a very small message (no notification) saying "TRAIN CANCELLED DUE TO STRIKE".

 

Huh?

 

TGV, the rail service in France that was supposed to get us from Mannheim (our German transfer) to Marseille, had been on strike for some time and had started randomly cancelling certain routes. Since it was Christmas Day, we couldn't get ahold of anyone for support until noon the following day (just one hour before our train was scheduled to depart). Our Deutsche Bahn contact at the station told us that no trains were running in France period and that we would be best off renting a car or getting a bus to Marseille (both of which would have been hundreds of Euros to book last minute). I found this different route online that TGV said was open, but had us routing through different cities. Instead of traveling from Sankt Wendel to Trier to Mannheim to Marseille and arriving around 4pm, we were to travel from Sankt Wendel to Trier to Luxembourg to Paris to Marseille late that night, meaning we'd lose a lot of time, but not the end of the world. Tickets for the new route were of course ridiculously expensive so we decided to wing it and just play the ignorant tourist card with our old tickets (I knew for a fact DB didn't care, but had no idea about TGV).

 

Halfway from Sankt Wendel to Trier, I'm checking the itinerary for our "revised" journey, and in the ~half hour since I checked it last, the route from Trier to Luxembourg (a DB line, so unaffected by the strike) was just... no longer running. No explanation as to why. It was just going to go to the German border but no further. I started to lose it a little at this point. Keep in mind that through this entire thing, my girlfriend has a small suitcase and a backpack and I have a small suitcase, a large suitcase, and a backpack, since I was taking all my things from my exchange home with me.

 

I found ANOTHER option that had us sitting on that same train we were going to Trier on but instead taking it the opposite way, ending in Mannheim (explaining our situation to 3-4 ticket handlers at this point, but as I predicted, they could not care less). Once in Mannheim we planned to take a train to Paris, but the leg from Paris to Marseille would need to be done the following morning, meaning we would be stranded overnight in Paris. Me, being a cheap bastard, planned to lock up our stuff then sleep in the train station. Regardless, we had to make it there first.

 

Luckily, this Mannheim-Paris train actually had a ton of people on it that weren't supposed to be, so the ticket people didn't give us a hard time, but they did tell us to go to a specific car (thank god we know French because they did not, or would not, speak a lick of English) if we didn't have a reserved seat. However, they didn't tell us this until after we had boarded and the cars were not connected internally, so at the first stop, we had to SPRINT from our car to the very back of the train to get back on it before it left again.

 

Now, we finally made it to Paris and step off the train at around 9pm, we planned to take the 8am train to Marseille, so we had 11 hours to kill. We saw that the TGV office in Gare d'Est was still open so we decided to shoot our shot and cry for them a bit. Lo and behold, after 30 minutes of being told by various people that they would fetch their manager, we walked out of the station with not only a legitimate ticket for a train to Marseille the next morning, but also a free hotel room near the station we were departing from (Gare de Lyon, so ~45 minute walk from Gare d'Est)! It honestly could not have ended any better.

 

We suffered through that 45 minute walk with all our luggage and through the rain (because of course it was raining) because, again, I am a cheap bastard and the subway was closed due to the strike as well. Then we wandered along the Seine, past the Grand Palais and Notre Dame, and it all felt kind of worth it. Our journey to Marseille the next morning mostly without a hitch, and we had a splendid time the rest of our journey.

 

That is, until every single one of our four flights back home got delayed and we nearly got stuck on a tiny island in the Atlantic during a storm for a day or more, but that story isn't nearly as interesting.

[fonziGG 1,065]

Interesting story, Eno. I enjoyed reading that

[Victor 10,526]

ah the French, always striking

[Rayzor_7 741]

8 minutes ago, Victor said:

ah the French, always striking

you misspelled Surrendering

[mediocrepony 1,216]

Dude, u coulda got like 40 TPE for that