Annecy to Paris

day 22 – jour vingt-deux

Keeping up the two-night-and-move rhythm, we again packed our bags this morning and got ready for our move to Paris. Throughout the tour, we were moving N to S, but now we’ve rewound and are going even further north, and I can feel it. The mornings are colder and darker, the dark evenings come earlier. I checked the weather at home and it looks like freezing weather is eminent.

There was a market this morning in Annecy, so we made sure to make time to explore what it offered. So many vendors with tons of different cheeses, breads, preserved meats, vegetables, and fruit. It all looked delicious even though I had no idea what any of the meats or cheeses were. With only coffee for breakfast, Mom and I shopped with our stomachs. We found a couple delicious looking pastries, a small loaf of olive bread, a half round of some kind of chevre, a small pile of marinated olives, and four more pears.

Goodies in hand, we walked back to our flat and finished getting ourselves reassembled for travel. 1145 we loaded up, locked up, and set off for the train station.

We got to the station and only had to wait a few minutes for the platform number/letter to come up. I couldn’t easily see the coach numbers, so we asked for assistance and ended up walking way too far down the platform. I finally realized where the numbers were on the screens and when I thought we’d gotten to about the right spot, we boarded the train and found our seats, second floor! We settled in for our ~4 hr trip, but about 5 mins later, a couple comes down the coach and says we’re in their seats… Oops! Apparently we were in coach 13 instead of 12. Easy fix, but we had to grab up all our bags and shuffle over to the next coach. Finally in our *correct* seats, we resettled ourselves. It wasn’t much later that we started pulling out our goodies from the market and chowing down.

From Annecy, the train made three stops before Paris. I felt like we were traveling in slow motion for most of the trip. I kept checking our progress towards Paris against the time left until arrival and got very doubtful. A bit southwest of Annecy, we started traveling along this beautiful lake, Lac du Bourget. I couldn’t get over the colors of the shallow water!

After stopping in three relatively small towns close to Annecy, we still had quite a distance to cover in about an hour. I knew our train was going to arrive a half hour late, but I didn’t catch the explanation, something to do with Italy? We’d started in fairly mountainous terrain, but as the train accelerated out of our last stop, we were quickly surrounded by rolling cornfields. Finally this high-speed train lived up to its name. It sounded like we were preparing for takeoff as we reached top speed.

An hour or so later we arrived in Paris! It was raining unfortunately, but we needed to take the metro most of the way anyways. The train station was a bit of a maze, but eventually I spotted signs for the metro and led the way down. We arrived at Gare du Lyon on the train and had to catch the 1 line for a few stops and then the 9 for a few more. We tried to follow our hosts instructions, but it seemed like something was backwards. (First time mom’s been right about directions!) Luckily, it was super easy to hop off, switch sides of the platform, and hop back on going the opposite direction. For not using public transit at home, I’ve gotten fairly competent using these metro systems. We arrived at the Saint Ambroise station and followed signs to Popincourt so we popped out on the right side of the street. 😉

Our Airbnb was just another couple minute walk down a quiet side street. Look, mom’s in Paris!

By the time we got in and got settled, it was dark and we didn’t want to wander too far from home. We did need to eat though, so we went far enough to find a little grocery store and get soup, salad, ravioli, and wine. Bon appetit!