This past weekend was my grand vacation. It was incredible and exhausting and this post is going to have to detail the fact that I was on five different kinds of trains--four of them within 24 hours.
Now, I have little to no experience on trains. Supposedly I learned to walk on a train in New Zealand, but I don't remember that. I have very vague memories of being on a train to Virginia that was very late and had a few drunk businessmen on it. In any case, this was the first time that I truly remember being on a train.
I left Nantes at 6pm from the Gare SNCF on a TGV (Train à grande vitesse/super fast train). I'd sprung for first class on the train and booked a solo seat because if there are things I enjoy, it's wide, cushy chairs and being alone in a row on transportation so I don't have to bother other people to get up.
There were very few people on the train and it was very quiet, so I wrote a lot, read a little, and tried to look out the window, but it was dark already, so I ended up just looking awkwardly at my own reflection. The train arrived at the Paris Montparnasse station and I had to take the metro to Gare de l'Est, which was actually very easy, except I think I broke the ticket selling kiosk.
The next morning, I had a ticket for the Orient Express.
It's not the same Orient Express that ran in the 20s since that train was sold at auction, but someone bought those cars and now the train runs anew. There is a car on the train that was used as a brothel in WWII and everything is very old and very fancy. I found that it existed after a short trip through Google and then realized that one of their Paris-London trips coincided with a long weekend when I had been planning on visiting Jess and Leah up in the UK.
I spent the night at a Holiday Inn right across the street from the station before getting up early and heading to the platform for check in at 8:30am, an hour before departure as was recommended. The train was already waiting when I arrived--it was deep, glossy blue, with lettering in brass. I was given my tickets and travel documents before a woman named Nastasia led me to the cafe to wait for my compartment to be ready. She escorted me back to the train where I met the manager of the car, Pierre, who was dressed in a white double-breasted coat. I'd written that the purpose of my journey was to celebrate my letter of admission to Sciences Po. If you tell the Orient Express that you are celebrating something, I suppose they tell the entire staff, because everyone from a very distinguished tour guide to the stewards in their bright blue suits with their round blue hats congratulated me.
I had the 10:30am breakfast sitting, so I headed out of my private cabin early and ran across a tour and just sort of pretended that I belonged there, which allowed me to learn more about the history of the train. Breakfast was actually brunch which was actually more like lunch. I struggled with the scrambled eggs because I didn't know which fork to use, but it was delicious and topped with smoked salmon.
I love smoked salmon.
The second course was lobster with mashed potatoes and then the meal finished with caramelized apple cake and vanilla ice cream. One super benefit of travelling by yourself is that every table got five chocolates, no matter how many people were sitting there, and so I got to eat all five of them.
We arrived in Calais at around 2:30pm, ready for our transfer to the coach buses that would take us through the tunnel. I count the tunnel train, which could hold all of our coach buses, as the third train. It was uneventful, but I was tucked away in a bus.
The fourth train was the British Pullman, a sister train of the Orient Express. On this train, we had an afternoon tea: sandwiches, scones, and little cakes.
Some of the sandwiches were smoked salmon.
I arrived in Victoria Station in London, about an hour later than expected, and before my phone died I was furiously Facebook-messaging Jess, and fortunately she found me, put me on the tube, and we got to her place and even had the energy to leave again to go to a pub that night.
That was a lot of trains. You can even count the Paris metro and the London tube as trains too, and then there were even more.
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