Posts Tagged ‘France’

We left Luxembourg in the morning and had a rather slow train ride to Strasbourg, in France.  I’m not sure if there was something wrong with the train, but about every 20 minutes we would stop for five or ten minutes before continuing on.  And not at a station either, just in the middle of nowhere.  Still, it was pretty countryside and we were not in too much of a hurry.

Once we got to Strasbourg it about noon and we headed straight to the information desk in the train station.  They were very helpful and explained how to get the tram to the hotel we had booked, and what the best transportation options are.  Strasbourg has a really good tram system that runs at most hours of the day and it is possible to get a ticket (for about 5 Euros) that lets up to three people travel on the trams as much as they want for 24 hours.  This was so, so good.  We were able to see so much of the city and had no problems at all getting around.

Our hotel was called Cerise Hotel and was a big success.  Inexpensive, really clean, internet in the rooms (important because we still had a lot of planning we needed to do) and even had a fridge and microwave in the room so that you could eat in a bit.  We took pretty full advantage of that!

Our plan was to do a few hours of planning and work on updating the (very out of date) blog and then to get out and see something of the city in the evening.  Despite having a small setback with our internet not working, the hotel sent someone up immediately to fix it, and we were able to get a few days of plans finalized.  This calmed us down substantially and as we set out to see the city we were feeling so happy and positive!

We took the tram to the central area and then walked around taking it in.

Canal and "Petite France"

(more…)

I haven’t been looking forward to writing this post.  To be honest, we hit a pretty low point in our trip and it threw both of us for pretty ugly loops.  I don’t want to dwell on it, but I think there are some traveling lessons to be learned, and we’ve had to adjust recently.  We got very accustomed to being able to plan a day or two ahead of time and just show up places and have things work out.  This is not the way that Europe works.  Especially in the summer.  Especially if you’re trying to save money.

We discovered this in a dramatic fashion.  The night before we left London I booked us a bus from London to Paris (which is really kind of cool – they put the bus on a train and take the train through the chunnel!) and then started trying to look for a place to stay.  It was late and we may have had a drink or two with our friends and we just wanted to go to sleep since we had to get up early for our bus.  But we couldn’t find a single hotel or hostel online in Paris for the next night for less than 200 Euros.  Total panic ensued.  And we still didn’t have a place to stay when we left the next morning.  We also didn’t have our bus ticket printed, but that was easily solved with an internet cafe across the street from London Victoria Coach Station.

By the time we got to Paris in the evening we were worried, tired, stressed out and figured we had two choices.  We could jump right into our Eurail pass and take a train to somewhere smaller where we thought we could get cheaper accommodation, or we could wander the streets of Paris fairly randomly until we found a place to stay.  We flipped through the train timetable (which we have since become very well acquainted with) and picked Strasbourg since we wanted very much to go there and there was a train leaving soon and it was only a two hour trip by TGV.

(more…)