Day 10 – You Can’t Get There from Here…. With Bikes

Well, this is a first.  Somewhere I know I had heard that the TGV trains were becoming less and less accommodating of bikes that aren’t in cases.  It’s definitely been confirmed.  We have usually used the regional TER and intercity trains with our bikes. To get to Bern or Geneva, or really anywhere outside of France, we would need to take a TGV.  So, we decided to see how to get back to Paris from Lyon.  Oof! Even that is proving tricky.  We have always raved about the flexibility the trains provide us in France, but we have found the limits to that.

We think we’ve found a route and we’ll book that for tomorrow because there aren’t seats left for Friday except extremely early in the morning.  So much for our attempt at spontaneous travel! It really is possible in Europe, but with bicycles along, it’s a bit trickier.

We got into Lyon just fine and headed off towards the hotel, through rush hour traffic.  It wasn’t too bad because a lot of the commuters were on bikes too, making it easy to follow them through the intersections where the bike lanes often shift around.  Lyon is a bustling large city and while I’m glad we got to see it, I’m not disappointed that we can’t stay longer.

Wait, is that a hill with buildings I see off in the distance?  Why, yes, yes it is.  How did we not think to check the terrain, AGAIN?  We got to the bottom of the hill, confirmed that the hotel we booked was up there and made the decision to take a hit on the cancellation fee and found a cheaper hotel back towards the train station a bit.  It was a nice hotel for the price and had a place to store our bikes in a locked garage inside a shared courtyard.  It was along a shopping district street and we found a Fish and Chips place nearby with fantastic ratings.  We were not disappointed.  

We finally got a train figured out to Paris, but instead of a 2 hour TGV train, it was a TER train with 15 stops and took over 5 hours.  We got to the train station with plenty of time to spare, but we had to hang out a while until the platform our train would be leaving from was posted.  Fortunately, it finally popped up about 15 minutes ahead of time.  As it pulled in, we saw a bike car and headed for it.  It was a tight fit on an older train car, but we finally got everything on and secured and settled into seats for the long ride.  We saw lots of beautiful countryside and went through more of the Massif Central, which we had been riding in – not a problem if you are along a canal or river, but problematic when you deviate from that.  Trains really are the best of both worlds – you still get to see lots of scenery, but you don’t have to pedal to do it.

We had no problem navigating from the Bercy train station back to our familiar neighborhood in Paris, Montparnasse.  We love the “starving artist” history here and this trip we plan to check out the local cemetery where people like Jean-Paul Sartre are buried.  Our bikes are safely stored in our hotel on Boulevard Montparnasse and we can now just hang out and see sites we want to see again or maybe for the first time.

Many have called us adventurous, and I suppose we are a bit.  We wouldn’t likely try it, though, without the magic of Google maps, Booking.com, etc.  It would require a lot more planning and carrying a lot of detailed paper maps, as well as an old-fashioned compass!  But we aren’t so adventurous that we don’t enjoy coming back to the familiar here in our favorite area of Paris, le 14ème.  

Photos from our dinner last night at a tiny, but amazing, Italian restaurant across the street: