On the way to Paris

Oh Sea France, you are not our favorite. So we had a 45 minute delay which made the rest of our trip to France quite the adventure. Because of the delay, we missed our train to Paris that left from Calais. Luckily, all was not lost. We met another backpacker, a girl from Belgium on the boat who asked if we wanted to share a cab with her to Calais. Little did we realize that the train station was 18km from the ferry. She was an unbelievable help to us, along with our cab driver, who both told us that we did not need to wait for the next train out of Calais that would have left at 10. Evidently, Calais is like many port towns, and is not safe at night. So instead we took the train with our new friend to Lille, France, which is a very large city, and would have trains going into Paris. Things got a bit tricky when we parted ways in Lille, she having to quickly take another train to her home in Belgium. We quickly realized that there was not another train to Paris from the station, but went and asked information anyways. He told us to go across the street that there was a train from there. We realized that across the street was the metro, and were quite confused about that. We asked another information person, but between his English, and my French, we were both confused. Finally we realized that there was another train station, and the information person had his supervisor by then to try to find out if there was another train to Paris. They were all so nice and took us quickly down to catch the next metro to the station, not even having us buy a ticket , and put us on the train and told us exactly where to get off. Once we arrived we saw that there was one more train to Paris, but we had just missed it!! We were being watched over though, because I went to look at another board and realized that the train had been delayed. We ran downstairs and hopped on the last train out of Lille to Paris. I proceeded to then ask about 3 people if we were in fact on the train to Paris, because I was certain that we were not this lucky. It turns out that there had been a fire at the station, so they delayed the train in Lille, so they could take care of the situation in Paris. We pulled into the station just past midnight, much, much later that we had intended to arrive. We managed to find our hotel, refusing to pay for a taxi. Don’t worry, at 12:30 there were still people eating at cafes, so it was not like we were walking through the streets alone. It was quite an adventure, but well worth it because Paris is amazing and beautiful. After we checked into the hotel, we went around the corner to a café because we had still not eaten dinner. The owner asked us where we were from and when we told him North Carolina, he told us that his daughter lives in Charlotte. Such a small world! We got wonderful baguette sandwiches from him, and finally went to sleep around 2. We were both still a bit high strung from such a crazy day! Luckily, we are staying in a nice hotel, so it was a nice end to such a stressful time. Welcome to Paris!

Carrie