Saturday Aug. 31 - Train to Bourg-en-Bresse, France

Deb here. Saturday morning we packed up, said our goodbyes to the crew and then walked our luggage to the ferry back to Central Station. Teri, Ralph, Nancy and Greg were all flying home on the same 2:30 pm flight to Boston, so their plan was to stash their luggage on the boat for a while and walk to a nearby farmers market. We said our goodbyes to the gang at the ferry dock and made our way across the water
to the train station. We quickly found which platform we’d be leaving from, and decided to sit in a coffee shop until closer to our departure time.

Our train left like clockwork at 11:08 am, bound for Paris, where we had to switch train stations to catch our next train to Bourg-en-Bresse. All was going well until the train had a couple of delays, meaning that instead of 1.5 hours to find our next train in Paris we’d only have less than an hour. Our train from Amsterdam made several stops along the way and was packed, with people standing in the aisles, by the time we reached Paris.

We hustled off our train and quickly found the metro we needed to board to transfer from Gare Paris Nord (where we arrived) to Gare de Lyon (where we needed to go). There was quite a queue to buy metro tickets, but thankfully each self-serve ticket station had a helper next to it, taking charge of what we needed.

We jumped on the metro and made it to Gare de Lyon with 15 minutes to spare. This train was much less crowded and had a great cafe car. It was another double decker train and achieved a speed of close to 200 mph. Very comfortable.

By 6:15 we were in Bourg-en-Bresse, where I’d made a hotel reservation to split up our journey to Leysin. It was super hot when we arrived, and with a 20 minute walk to our hotel (Logis de Brou) we were drenched in sweat by the time we checked in! It was a lovely hotel and we enjoyed the AC in our room. We later walked to dinner and had a wonderful meal at Restaurant L’Authentique, with a croque monsieur and salad for me and a burger and salad for John. 

After dinner we walked back to the hotel and crashed for the night.