Travel Chaos

After an eventful and very enjoyable venture home, it came to the time for me to come back to Paris. With a slightly heavy heart at again saying farewell to Wilmslow my sadness quickly turned to excitement, tiredness and eventually anger!

An empty flight again gave me the luxury of space on the aeroplane but on my arrival at Charles de Gaulle, and just as the fatigue of a non-stop 4 days hit me, I saw a sign saying the RER back into Paris wasn't running. Great. It transpired that there was a replacement bus I needed to take. I allowed an hour, thinking I'd be in bed by 11.30 but I was confused to see everyone getting off at the first stop, a train station seemingly in the middle of nowhere. I soon realised that it was the only stop and we were going to be getting a different RER line back.

We were ushered through and onto platform 5, I took up a tactical position a bit further down hoping that I may get a seat but before we knew it 4,5 and then 6 buses arrived and the platform was packed. Half an hour went by with nothing and then the announcer said it'd be here in 25-40 minutes. No kidding, what sort of time frame is that for a trains arrival?? Midnight came and went and I was becoming delirious. 15 minutes passed during which an empty train had pulled into a different platform. Sure enough the tanoy sprung into life telling us that we had to get on this train. A stampede ensued and despite being told it wouldn't leave until everyone was on board, after about half the people had got on (including me), it did.

So we left 100 or so very, very angry French people but I was too tired to feel any empathy. We'd initially been told this would be direct to Gare du Nord but 2 minutes in we were told it would be acting as a replacement service and would stop at every station on the way. Brilliant, I thought, bed at 2am. I managed to muster a small chuckle and I kid you not, I didn't see anyone get off at any of the stops between. Nevertheless I was glad to arrive back into the station and when I was asked to show my ticket (which I didn't have) I duly told them to piss off and let me through. Which they did. Some comfort there..