Well, no, Paris isn’t burning today, but bits of it were last night. The French are celebrating their interminable dispute with the state (pensions this time) in the now traditional manner of being cross and throwing stuff at each other. Tomorrow there will be a General Strike.
Today however they are contenting themselves with buggering up our travel plans to Italy. We should have been travelling Lindon > Paris > Turin but the Turin train was cancelled so now we’re going London > Paris > Lyon where we will overnight before continuing on to Turin and Florence tomorrow, so normal service is resumed. Not to be outdone, Eurostar entered into the spirit by having a technical problem on the train which added an hour to our journey time and subtracted an hour from our transit time in Paris. It’s a lot easier to deal with disruption like this when you have the Great Rail Journeys rail department sitting on your shoulders and helping out.
What tour am I taking? It’s Hidden Treasures of Tuscany. We’ll be staying in Monteriggioni near Siena and we have excursions to Assisi & Perugia, Montepulciano & Pienza, Firenze and finally a day on the steam train Treno Natura.
It’s not fair to Paris, a city that I love to be so down on it, so here to cheer us all up is the best song ever written about the city but with a modern twist…
Tomorrow we continue our journey to Torino, Firenze and then Monteriggioni.
TimOnTheTrain 