Saturday, 24 September 2011

22 September. It Begins for Real!

Today it all began - the trip itself.

On a bright sunny Riviera morning, our TGV arrived in Menton having started its run to Paris from Ventimiglia in Italy. We wended our way gently along the coast, stopping at Nice and various places, then as we left the coast we slid through the warm vineyards of Provence until we hit Aix en Provence, when the train became a true TGV! Gone the gentle amble as we hit speeds which would see us in Paris three hours later.

At one point we had to stop to allow the Pompiers (firemen) to check for something (possibly the smoking exhaust - we must have been hitting close to 200kph). Then came an apology "we will be now 5 minutes late in Paris due the action of the Pompiers". 5 mins on a 700k run! As it turned we were on time. I love the TGV.

Across Paris on the Metro from Gare de Lyon to Gare du Nord and the train to Cologne. Another high speed, this tome a Thalys from Belgium. Not as comfortable as the TGV (did I say I love the TGV?), and crowded with young Germans, still full of their time in Paris. Although older than the TGV we still arrived on time, which gave us time to rush from platform 5 to platform 7 allowing us to relax for an hour and a half on a freezing Cologne night as we waited for the 22.28 train from Amsterdam to several places East including Moscow, our next destination.

Unfortunately the dirty rattling assemblage of carriages from various nations that made up train 477, reminding the now frozen writer of the rag-tag fleet of refugee spaceships headed by the Battlestar Galactica, was not as fast as a TGV (did I mention the TGV?), arriving half an hour late, and among the fleet passing slowly in front of us was a whitish wagon with Russian Railways blazoned on the side. Our home for the next 2 days!

Clean and servicable in a nice shade of institutional green, I was glad we had we had chosen to book first class. I'm sure the carriage had been state of the art when new, probably running Kruschev around the country! Orient Express this was not. Will the Trans Siberian have seen service with Lenin? We shall see.
And so to bed on day one after a nice Bordeaux with cheese and olives.

Tomorrow brings Poland.

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