Monday morning and we are off to St Pancras station to meet the rest of our group and our tour leader Kate. Unlike other Great Rail Journey holidays we have done we didn’t need to be there by 6am but a reasonable 8am. We hadn’t had breakfast as traveling Standard Premier, breakfast was included. The staff at Eurostar have it well organised dividing customers into two lanes depending on train time so the people on the earlier train get to the passport control and security first. Once through two lots of automatic passport control and them a manual stamp in the passport to say we were entering the EU we were through with time for a coffee and bun before our train left.
The plan for today was to leave St Pancras at 0931hr arriving at Gare du Nord at 1247hrs. we would then transfer by coach to Gare de Lyon to catch the 1443hr train to Turin. We would stay in a hotel overnight, evening meal included which we ordered this morning and then tomorrow afternoon we would catch the train to Florence then coach to our hotel for the week in Montecatini.
However Eurostar had other ideas with an announcement that a technical fault meant out train would be 15 minutes late leaving. This was followed 15 minutes later by, we would be getting a replacement train but that would be an hour and a half. The strange thing was the technical fault on our train affected all the others waiting to go out. It was obvious with this delay we wouldn’t get to Paris in time to catch our connection so Kate and GRJ were making plans.
When we finally arrived in Paris it was on to the coach and slowly wind our way through the Paris traffic. Kate had a couple of options but the traffic reduced that to one, so instead of Turin we went to Lyon for the night where we were all booked into the Mercure Hotel,, literally 5 minutes walk from the station. However at short notice they were unable to feed us all so a wander into town was called for to fend for our selves with GRJ giving us a rebate to pay for it. It was a charming old Château hotel with wood panelling in the public rooms.
Our bedroom was on the fifth floor, the first on the roof area, the doors to the rooms were in such thick walls that they had both an inner and outer door.
Below is our planned itinerary for the duration of our holiday.
No comments:
Post a Comment