Now this is where the trip went astray... in the best of all possible ways it turns out, although it just seemed hopeless at first. Our
plan (a word that should largely be left out of your vocabulary while traveling...) was to catch a train from Barcelona to Paris. Now, this sounds relatively simple. And it would be, if we were residents of Europe who can just book trains online. However, having a Eurail pass, we were forced to get prices in person (since you save on each train, the clerks need to check the validity of your pass). So, we leave our hostel and show up at the train station, gear and all, ready to get an overnight ride to northern France. At this point, I forget all the nitty-gritty details (probably a good thing), but after many attempts at finding the right combination of schedules and transfers (at the right
price was the kicker), we were told that we couldn't get a train to Paris in the next few days for under
€100 each, even with the Eurail discount.
Embarrassing. Back to the hostel and the drawing board.
Even if we made it to Paris without paying an arm and a leg, we had still scoured AirBnB and Albergues Juveniles (an immensely helpful Spanish search engine for youth hostels worldwide) and couldn't find any lodging remotely close to the city center, or even the ends of the metro lines, within our budget. (Our first approach for finding [free] accommodation is always Couchsurfing, but although it's a great site, it didn't work out for a couple of reasons... one being that we are a couple). So finally, since Paris wasn't in our original plan anyway, we decided to cut our losses and avoid the most expensive destination after all. This decision really freed us up for the fun part- talking to other guests that had been to France for advice... and exploring a map of France and Googling every town we could before someone else needed the hostel's computer.
When we found (on AirBnB) the inexpensive, charming apartment of a young couple in the small city of Limoges, that was it. We went from not knowing this place existed to arriving at its
center in about ten hours. This is the
type of travel I live for.
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| Limoges (pronounced Lee-mōzs) |
We missed the train by ONE minute. ONE measly minute. It is almost worse to see it pulling away without you than to have missed it by an hour. Catching another train wouldn't be a problem; we wouldn't have a fee to pay, either, so that didn't upset me. What upset me was the fact that we told our hosts in Limoges our arrival time in advance... Which would now be three hours later... And we didn't have a computer in order to message them... And the Spanish cell phones Alvaro's dad let us borrow didn't work in France. Asking to borrow a cell phone in one's own country is easy. Asking to to borrow a cell phone in another language is a whole different animal... Especially if that language is one to which you've never been exposed. You should have seen the looks I got, scraggly nomad that I was, sputtering broken French to sharp-dressed business-types. Anyway, long story... well, I guess it's too late for short, isn't it? We made it.
Poor Bastien had arrived at the station to meet us at 5:00 PM and had to return at 8:00PM due to our delay. But being the kind, easy-going soul that he is, he didn't seem to mind.
Thus commenced our adventures in small-town France.
