TGV With Me?

Along the Canal out of Toulouse

I had planned a trip to Paris for some time and purchased the tickets in early February.  I would meet up with a friend, Jen,  from our old lives back in Brookings, where we both worked for the school district.  She is now teaching in Russia, after a stint in some schools in China.  She and a colleague were planning to spend part of their spring break in Paris and she invited me to meet up with them.  I had been wanting a little get-away to Paris, with a side trip to Chartres, so I jumped at the chance to connect and catch up with her.

Canal paralleling the river

A week or so before I was to take the TGV up the 'east' side, through Lyon, there were notices in all the media outlets that there was a big strike by the railroad workers planned for the day of my scheduled departure.  I hemmed and hawed whether or not to have an adventure and travel on strike day, or to play it a little safer (but costlier) and leave a day earlier.  In the end, cost be damned, I decided to leave before the planned action. 

Either gorse (ughh) or broom--too fast to really tell

My new ticket, however, took a different TGV route to Paris.  Instead of going up the "east" side through Lyon, I would be traveling up the west-center, from Carcassonne to Toulouse and then to Bordeaux and from there to Paris.  I was going to get to see a different part of the country, and was glad to do so.  I scurried around and got myself ready to leave a day earlier than planned and off I set.

The soil is a different color

The day for travel was sunny, but it's been cold, and snowy.  I was amazed to see snow onthe Montagnes Noires all the way down to the bottom of the slopes.  The snow-peaks of the Pyrenees gleamed in the far distant southwest.  We've had plenty of wild weather in the south here this winter.

One form of energy generation

And another

I also took advantage of the last minute senior special offer and bought first class TGV tickets for only 5 Euros more.  In reality, there's not all that much difference between first and second class, except that first class is very, very quiet.  I don't think there was a single child in any of the cars marked first class.  Call me a curmudgeon, but I like the peace and quiet and being able to look out the window and meditate. 

A little country cottage in the distance

I didn't get any photos of the Carcassonne to Toulouse leg of the journey; I have made that so many times that I practically have it memorized.  But I did take quite a few from the moving train from Toulouse to Paris.  As I said, this was new territory for me.

Beautiful prosperous looking farm country

We followed the Canal for quite a long while.  The water seems bluer there than in Carcassonne, where it is mostly green.  And sometimes the Canal paralleled a rather large river.  Near Bordeaux, I did get the feeling I was near the sea, and expected to see it at any moment.  I wish I could have had the window open to see if I could have smelled it, to see if the Atlantic smells different than the Mediterranean.  I will save that for another trip.

I was surprised at how few vineyards I could see in the Bordeaux region, especially given the fame of its wine.  Here in the Languedoc, vineyards cover nearly every square meter.  Soon the soil took on a different color and the vegetation changed.  I saw what looked like gorse growing along the railroad tracks, but couldn't get a decent photo.  The train was moving too fast. 

The ride is so smooth that you don't realize how fast you are moving until you come upon an auto-route and realize that those cars and trucks are probably traveling at 60-75 miles per hour and you are smoothly and relatively silently leaving them in the dust.  Bordeaux to Paris in just a little over 2 hours is astonishing.  

Collection of buildings surrounded by fields

There was plenty of farmland to see.  The farms in this part of France look bigger and more prosperous than the ones here in the Languedoc.  Here in the south they seem scrappier and smaller.  From the train window I saw great swathes of green and brown in every shade imaginable.

Spring seemed a little behind us here--the snow notwithstanding.  The flowering trees were putting forth blossoms and the forsythia was also making quite a showing.  Both have been out for some time here.  There was still plenty of winter browns and greys.  Mistletoe was everywhere, some of it so low-hanging that a toddler could have reached up and plucked it.  

Scads of mistletoe--sorry for the blur, but photos at 100 mph are hard for me

I am sure I appeared quite the gawker, but I am far, far past caring about what other people think. On the ride home, which brought me down the "east" side, the way I have always come from and gone to Paris, I never even glanced out the window.  It was a pleasant enough journey, at least until reaching Beziers, where I had to transfer to a regional TER train.  Both the one to Narbonne and the one from Narbonne to Carcassonne were packed to the gills and there is no assigned seating on the TER's.   I made some jackass move who had hogged 4 seats for himself....really???!!! Look around you, buddy, people are standing and he somehow thought it was okay to have 4 seats all to himself?  Unless he paid for 4 seats, and I highly doubt that, I wasn't going to let him get away with it.  I got a seat!

So, I made a big circle journey from Carcassonne.  I will try to get that trip through Bordeaux the next time I travel to Paris--it's clean, fast and comfortable. All the things train travel ought to be.