offpeakfang

Crossing the Seine by métro, August 2024 Paris is a very extravagant day trip from London, and I'd certainly recommend much more time there for a first-time visitor, but for those who've already been plenty of times then it can be a day trip. About a week before the start of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, I noticed that there were still quite a lot of reasonably-priced tickets still available - including in table tennis, a sport that I do occasionally enjoy and am alright at. So, for €44.50, I bought a ticket to a Table Tennis Team Quarter-Final.  There are plenty of ways of travelling between London and Paris - over the years, I've done all of them. The Eurostar is by far the best, but is expensive at short notice. Flights are usually relatively cheap, but price-inflated at Olympic time and an exceptionally poor environmental choice especially when the overall city-centre to city-centre price is the same as the train and the journey time is in practice slower by air. I'...

Cité de Carcassonne, the very archetype of a medieval fortress. December 2019.  Ryanair's way of negotiating cheap handling fees at small airports is simply to threaten to leave: they are often the only airline serving the airport, so if they leave then the airport will simply cease to exist . Carcassonne is a good example, where it becomes a much more significant tourist attraction simply because Ryanair has cheap flights there - there are so many things that cost more than our £10 tickets from Carcassonne back to Stansted.  Most importantly, it opened up an opportunity to play Carcassonne (the board game) in Carcassonne (the medieval fortress city from which the game is named), and spend a day thinking about trebuchets along the way.  View of the fortress from the Old Bridge.  The fortress itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is one of the best-preserved Roman citadels in Europe. Founded in the Gallo-Roman period in the 3rd Century, it has been a defensive f...

The Côte d'Azur near Cannes from the TGV, March 2020 Having had an interesting morning surrounded by the money of Monaco and having visited two new countries (truncated from the original plan of three), it was time to get back to the UK. The boring way would have been to fly back from Nice, but then I'd get home late in the evening and get back to work the following day. But once I added in the cost of getting an airport coach home, it would have cost very similar to getting back over land by train. Of course I'd choose the latter, and actually see much more of France on the way back. Then there's also the extra bonus of being able to bring wine back from France... Incidentally, had I done this trip  a few years ago , SNCF would have still been running their sleeper train from Nice to Paris - the direct descendent of the former ultra-luxury  Train Bleu , the great symbol of the  belle-epoque  period used by the rich and famous to get to the French Riviera, with...

The Passerelle du Collège looking moody in the evening, Lyon, March 2020. Continuing with my truncated microstates itinerary, my next journey was from Geneva to Monaco. Any form of transport between the two involved changing at Lyon, so I took the Transport Express Régional (TER) from Geneva to Lyon. It runs every few hours with old but comfortable carriages, going along the Rhone valley through the Jura mountains. As a TER service, the tickets cost the same on the day as booked in advance and so I just bought my ticket from the SNCF machine in the France-bound section of the station.  Preparing to leave Geneva station from the customs-controlled platforms.  As Switzerland is part of the Schengen area but not part of the EU customs union, travelling between Switzerland and the EU can involve customs checks but not immigration checks. The trains to France leave from special customs-controlled platforms accessed through a customs control corridor, where the customs officers just...