InterRail 2022

Sunday funday.

Do you remember when I mentioned how crucial it is to do the TGV reservation days in advanced. Well on Sunday I stepped once again into the same trap. The train to Dijon was fully booked. The reservation of my hotel in Dijon was not refundable and there where literarily no more trains out of Bordeaux on this day as it appeared on the InterRail reservation platform.

So in the morning we quickly went to the train station to see if I can buy a first class ticket to Dijon and behold, the machine showed me, that there is still tickets available so I entered birthdate, email, mobile number, full name and clicked through 7 layers of pre-settings until I was asked to pay. I held my phone on the contactless payment system witnessed how it failed.

We sadly returned to the city center bought a souvenir, cheered ourselves up with an iced cream and maundered through the streets. An hour before the train departed we returned to the train station to buy the crazy overpriced first class ticket to Dijon but…
No more tickets were available. I started looking for a train to Montpellier, but InterRail told me that there is no free slots anymore. Narbonne the same and the worst nightmare was Paris. There was not one available seat to Paris.

In the end I decided to go to Nantes since the train towards Paris allowed me to book a seat from Bordeaux to St. Pierre de Corps and then a connection train to Nantes. I paid the overpriced ticket and booked an accommodation. I said goodbye to my amazing islander girl, since she had to catch a flight back to Menorca. I sat down in Bordeaux dirty and hot train station and waited the 1.5 hours until the train was supposed to arrive. It did not. First it showed a 30 minute delay which turned into a 1h 20 minute delay due to an accident on the railroad. Due to this delay I was not able to reach the connection train in St. Pierre de Corps so I just decided to stay in the train, inside the fist class voiture and I continued my journey to Paris. Luckily not one single ticket inspector appeared during the entire trip from Bordeaux to Paris.

I arrived in Paris at 11.30pm where I had to find for a second hostel option, the one I found earlier in the train was not available anymore. With an eScooter I drove to the hostel and at the reception was a nice Chilean guy who let me check in even after the official check-in hours. I had a cold beer at the bar which was attached to the hostel and then I dropped my stuff in the dorm and took a eScooter to La Tour Eiffel. I booth two more tiny beers from a Indian street vendor and enjoyed the view. Around 1.30am I went back to the hostel and fell asleep in a undercooled dormitory.

I got up around 8 in the morning, took a shower, checked out, had a croissant and a cappuccino, hopped into the metro towards Concorde, walked through the square and took a train to Disneyland where the TGV which started in Nantes was stopping. Since I already had the reservation from Nantes to Switzerland I thought it would be best to take this train and not loosing once more some money.

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