Today’s journey began well enough: we got an earlier than planned train from Bellinzona to Basel, which has the advantage of requiring no change. It also allowed a bit of ‘just in case’ recovery time, and the delay in leaving Bellinzona was made up in Luzern, where the train changes direction. That gave us time for lunch in a nice little pitta joint in the long gallery that runs over the middle of Basel SBB station.
Our TGV to Paris arrived just about on time, but had to make extra stops in Besançon, Montbard and I forget where else. In the station in Mulhouse, a glance to my right lit on a SIG automatic pistol. The gendarmes were on board, and in due course a sad-looking skinny kid was ushered off between two hefty flics. I guess that must have added a good ten minutes to our journey (and doubtless subtracted a lot more from the kid’s liberty). We consequently arrived 45 minutes late at the Gare de Lyon, to find a long taxi queue and one about as long for the sole working ticket machine in the RER.
Surprise, surprise, we missed our Eurostar, and could not get bookings in either of the next two. Fortunately, there were no-shows, so we got seats (some distance apart) on the train that left an hour after the one we were booked on, but only after a long, nerve-wracking wait. The ride home was mercifully without incident, and we got straight into a taxi at the station, arriving home about fourteen and a half hours after leaving the flat.
The main and best memory of our trip is the wonderful scenery of the Rhine valley and Switzerland. But the worst is the awfulness of the travelling experience. True, we had chosen a pretty challenging itinerary, and one can’t anticipate people throwing themselves under trains - the explanation for our dreadful journey from Cologne to Basel. But Deutsche Bahn could have done much better by re-routing our original train via Freiburg. And the legendary efficiency of the Swiss Federal Railway seems to be a thing of the past. Of course, our last trip to Switzerland was spoiled by our Zürich to London City flight having to return to Zürich when the pressurisation system failed. We then had to wait hours before returning to Heathrow, and almost missed the last train home. We no longer do long trips by road, so, unless we stick to cruises, I guess we’ll just have to grin and bear the airport experience. As Martyn said just now, the waiting areas at St Pancras and the Gare du Nord are just as bad as the airports.
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