Decamping

I'm skipping over a day, the best day of the trip, one of the best days ever; that day alone would have made the trip more than worth every effort and euro expended...even though we got pounded with rain. It was Mother's Day. For her present, my wife got to walk over a mile in her flats, and to be liberally laved in the lavish lacrimal offerings of the French heavens. 

So moving right along... Monday, we decamped to another location. Fortunately, our bags had plenty of room for all of our decamping equipment. Our time at Versailles had come to an end; sadly, we departed. Perhaps we were sad because we had to leave early in the morning, before anyone else at the hotel was even up, or so it seemed. We were to depart from Versailles-Chantiers, which, you may recall, was where we had arrived...near, but not exactly at the planned point of arrival in Versailles. Another benefit of that earlier faux pas (which expression always make me think that someone is referring to a fake father) was that we knew exactly where our station was located and how far it was from our hotel. That earlier missing of the mark worked out in our favor. BOOM! Winning! (Picture below of the Gare Versailles-Chantiers from this site).

We didn't take a taxi. I went out the night before we left and looked at the bus stop for the routes to figure out which bus we needed to take to get us to the train station in time to catch our early train. I determined that we should take the express, the T bus, for the best results. However, when we went to catch it, two other buses came first. I turned my nose up at the first bus like it was so much spoiled yogurt, and let it depart sans nous. However, I asked the second bus driver if his bus went to our destination, and if so, if it would get us there before our target time. He assured me that it would, and seemed amused at my concern; he dismissed any need to take the T bus, inviting us to board his coach instead. And so we did. The bus got us to the station in plenty of time...but there was another obstacle. 

I had given this schedule a great deal of thought. I had purchased and printed our tickets for our travel from Versailles to Compiegne weeks before we left. The thing is...to get to the trains, we had to pass through gates. To get the gates to open, one had to put a ticket into a slot, which would read the magnetic strip on the back of the ticket and open the gate. As you might have guessed, our home-printed tickets had no magnetic strip; additionally, the little scanner that might have read tickets such as ours, seemed to be out of order. Finally, there was no one in the booth to give us assistance. We were watching time slippin away while we were unable to make any progress toward the platform and our train. This was particularly concerning because we had to take this train to Gare Montparnasse in the south of Paris, and then take the metro to Gare du Nord in the north of Paris, and then catch our train to Compiegne. A missed train at Versailles would render our tickets for Compiegne worthless. 

Finally, with minutes to spare, two ladies arrived at the booth. An attractive blonde woman, especially cute in her little SNCF cap, and with a very helpful and friendly disposition, listened to my concern. She examined our tickets, and then pushed the magic button to let us through the gate. She also directed us to the proper platform to catch our train. And so we did. We were on our way back to Paris.

Next time: More fun with trains.