Trip to Avignon

So, the trip to Avignon was…interesting.

Not bad interesting. Actually quite dull. But a little different.

Basically, there’s no direct line to Avignon from Barcelona. This is mostly due to the fact that Spanish rail lines use a different gauge (distance between rails) on their track than just about everybody else. So, anyone going into or out of Spain by rail has to change to a different line near the border. Most people going from Barcelona to Avignon change at either Montpellier (on the French side) or Figueres (on the Spanish side). These are the ‘official’ Eurail routes.

Not so with Sean and I. When we went to the train station in Barcelona, we realized two things. 1) Eurail’s official routes are not at all comprehensive and 2) People in Barcelona reaaaallly don’t like speaking English. We talked with 4 different train officials, two of whom knew a bit of English, but didn’t speak it to us, one of whom actually spoke to us in English, and one who didn’t speak English, but was a master of Spanglish. 

Anyway, long story short, after about 2 hours at the train station, we figured out what we were doing.

Interestingly enough, though, the officials had pointed us to an unofficial route. Instead of one of the other two towns, this route took us through Cerbere, France. We were happy, ‘cause it took only local train routes, which meant that we didn’t have to pay a reservation fee (which eurailers have to do when riding long distance or high speed trains).

The wait at the station the day of was fun. We got there plenty early, and were drinking coffee in the waiting area when an Asian woman runs up to us, drops two suitcases and a backpack, asks us to watch it, then scurries off with two other bags.

Enter Ellen, another of those characters you only meet once in a long while.

Ellen came back a few minutes later, and we realized the two other bags were (occupied) cat carriers. She plopped down, thanked us, and struck up a conversation. Turns out, she had just finished a year-long stint at Google, and was moving back to France. She was…vague, at best, with what she did. She did tell us that, before her initial move to France, she worked on “UI design in Silicon Valley for 1

When we got to Cerbere, though, it was a ghost town. Our train was there, but there were maybe a dozen people at the train station, of which maybe a half-dozen were actually on our train. The rest were ticket salespeople, janitors, and border agents (Who were a little befuddled by my passport. The border agent in Lisbon was running low on ink, so the visa stamp is kinda faint. The poor agent here looked at my passport which seemed to say I magically materialized on a train in his country. He was fine when I pointed the stamp out to him, though).

Anyway, aside from that, the trip was fairly vanilla. I read a book on Provence, Sean read a book on his iPad, and we arrived. Got a nice view of the countryside, too, but it was mostly on or near the border, not before. The Spanish like to build their trains a bit below ground level, so aside from a bit of Figeueres, we didn’t see much. Once we got to Portbou, though, it was gorgeous. We drove through a few marshes, across a river, and spent a hefty amount of time on the coast, which was nice.

Anyway, we arrived in one piece, got checked in, and got dinner. Check another country off my list!