September 7-8
At the beginning of our World Trip, our planned railway journeys had been disrupted by strikes in France. This forced us to fly from London to Turin, to catch our booked train to Bari, in the foot of Italy. So we wanted to end our World Trip by the same route we had planned to take on our outbound leg, spending a night in Paris in the same hotel that we hadn’t got to stay in.
Our train from Carmaux took us to Toulouse where we picked up a TGV to Paris Montparnasse, stopping only at Bordeaux en route. The late arrival of the train driver in Bordeaux delayed us by 40 minutes.
Once we had arrived in Paris, it was very hot as we walked the 2.4 kilometres to our bijou hotel on the Left Bank, themed around champagne.
It was really special spending the last night of our marvellous trip in such a familiar and beautiful city. We enjoyed an unassuming but thoroughly delightful dinner outside, at a typical local brasserie.
Last evening meal Cooling down the red…
Afterwards we walked in the darkening twilight along the Seine, humming with people picnicking by the water’s edge or enjoying dinner on a bateau mouche. The reconstruction work after the fire at Notre Dame was lit up across the water.
Cooler by the river Notre Dame clad in scaffolding
We enjoyed a leisurely morning before taking metro line 4 from Odéon to Gare du Nord to join the Eurostar to London. We think we’ve found the best baker of pains au raisin, which we enjoyed sitting in a small park across the road from the Sorbonne in Paris.
Walk in the park Sorbonne
Wow, a huge modernisation programme is nearing completion on Metro line 4, with brand new driverless trains, glass barriers and doors between the platform and the tracks, and a new signalling and control system out of sight. Such a difference – just in time for the Rugby World Cup and the Olympics next year.
As usual, the Eurostar waiting area at Gare du Nord seems undersized for the volume of passengers, but we were early enough to get seats, which we had to guard carefully. As a result of Brexit changes, Passport Control now involves 2 sets of automatic gates, with a French agent having to stamp British passports in between the gates. This resulted in a long queue, which Peter avoided by showing his Swedish passport at a counter, before going through the automatic UK border gates.
Gare du Nord St. Pancras
The train journey to London was unremarkable except for the poor wifi. However the exit at St. Pancras was chock-a-block, with only one travelator operative and a full trainload of people with lots of luggage struggling to reach it.
Once we had negotiated our way out, it was a short walk to the Underground and only four stops to Belsize Park and the short walk up the hill to our flat.
We arrived at quarter to five, with a quick turnaround, as we had to leave at six to meet Kirsten, Dylan, Chris and Becca for Kirsten’s birthday dinner in Soho.
The flat was in excellent order – although without any hot water, which had failed just a couple of days before we left home in March. We were able to enjoy our evening in a hot buzzing Soho, with the prospect of unpacking our rucksacks and coming back to a different daily routine deferred until another day.
Home, sweet home! Please send me the address of the boulangerie / patisserie where you found the best pains au raisins. They are sans doubt my favourite patisserie!
* doute, pardon!