Today's journey involved two stages: Geneva to Lyon, and Lyon to Lille.

On Friday afternoon we received an email from SNCF, saying that our Lyon-Lille train had been cancelled "due to an interprofessional social movement" (aka strike, or -- we can speculate -- perhaps a side-effect of the strike, such as the train being in the wrong place).

This sent us into overdrive looking for alternatives. We could rebook onto another service, but that would mean crossing Paris, which we'd always wanted to avoid, and wanted to avoid even more during the current period of unpredictable industrial action (and thousands of tons of uncollected rubbish).

We found another possibility, but that involved sitting in the "child zone" of the train (whatever that is), and arriving after 2200 (and therefore technically too late to check into our accommodation). We investigated travelling via Germany, but that would not only have been very expensive, but also would have brought us into contact with possible German strike action. We investigated bailing completely, and flying from Geneva straight to London. Exorbitant, and all the flights I looked at seemed to not believe in luggage.

We'd just resigned ourselves to dealing with the child zone, and pleading for a late check-in, when Nigel took another look at the website. And lo and behold, a train matching our original itinerary had become available again, but with a different number, and costing an extra EUR 11 each... Same thing, but EUR 22 dearer... I have no idea what wizardry produced this outcome.

So we stumped up the cash, and booked pretty much the last two seats on that service. But we had little confidence that the journey wouldn't be further disrupted.

Anyway... Today... We lost an hour's sleep last night, as the clocks changed, and our smart phones smartly reset themselves, but weren't smart enough to consider that we might want to rest a little longer.

It was raining in Geneva this morning, but (squeezing the last little drop out of our free transport passes) we trammed up to the United Nations area, and walked back. A pleasant finale.








Before leaving, we had a little Blue Peter work to do, as SNCF requires your luggage to be labelled, and we had no labels. But it's amazing what you can do with two Scoot bags and four sticking plasters...


You can't reserve seats on the train to Lyon, but we got there early enough to secure a reasonable pozzy. And we set off promptly at 11.30.

At 12.15 another email popped up from SNCF. Uh, oh -- what NOW? But it was just to say that there would be no buffet car on the train to Lille. No worries. We had our sandwiches, and our doughnuts, and our bottles of water.

The journey to Lyon (which takes two hours) was very beautiful. The line twists along the Rhone Valley, then breaks away, only to rejoin the same river later. Green water, massive valley walls, viaducts, vineyards -- all good.






There was a terrible scrum boarding the train at Lyon. It had come from Marseille, and it was as though the complete original set of passengers got off at Lyon, to be replaced by an entirely new set (us). And everyone had a ton of luggage, so that had to be squirrelled away somewhere. By the time we were all on, with all our bags, the service was running five minutes behind schedule. (And, for the record, no-one checked our labels...)

So, we were on a train going where we wanted to go -- which we'd feared we wouldn't be.

True, we were at one of those table arrangements that I don't like, facing two complete strangers, and trying not to kick them. But there was a reasonable amount of room. And this was by far the fastest train we've been on during this trip. We fair whizzed up France, stopping just twice and taking only three hours to reach Lille.

It was 1700 hours; it was pretty cold; it was raining. But just walking from the station to our accommodation was enough to make us completely love this city. The centre is a maze of cobbled streets, full of higgedly-piggedly houses, all different heights and facade styles, but somehow looking homogeneous and elegant.


Our flat is on the second floor of one such old house. I absolutely love it. What a pity we're only staying two nights...






Today has certainly turned out much, much better than we'd dared to hope. Fingers crossed for the next leg, in two days' time...