The scenic route between Brussels and Paris
Trip date: January 27, 2017
With our Eurail Global pass, we generally have the ability to just jump on a train (in first or second class, since being > 27 and buying a global pass means you must buy the fare inclusive of first class). However, for many longer routes, reservations are compulsory and those costs can add up quickly.
In Germany, reservations cost about 12 euros for the both of us, so it wasn’t too bad. But in France, the high speed TGV trains that connect most of the country cost around 20 euros for a single seat reservation! So when we went from Brussels to Paris, Lishan found a route that would take us through some smaller cities without any reservation fees. Plus, there were generally multiple trains on most of these routes so if we missed one, we could just jump on the next one. This did mean we were sitting in second-class only trains though, c'est la vie :)
Our route was as follows:
- Brussels to Tournai (edge of Belgium)
- Tournai to Lille (France) - wander around and get lunch
- Lille to Amiens - check out the Notre-Dame Cathedral that is the biggest in Europe, grab dinner
- Amiens to Paris Gare du Nord
The regional trains we took were still fine, though they only had second-class seating. Until we hit Lille, the trains were super duper empty so it was pretty comfy. The train from Lille to Amiens though was super packed and we had to get friendly with our seat neighbors while holding all our stuff. We learned our lesson from that and got to the final train earlier so we could stake out seats and have more space.
Normally on trains, I’m able to get some reading done, but for some reason, these trains gave me pretty bad motion sickness when I was reading so I had to settle for music and napping/daydreaming for these trains. That’s actually not a bad thing either, as that quiet reflection time is what we don’t have as much of in this day and age, what with the interwebs and social media and all that.
When we got to Lille, we actually arrived at Lille-Flandres station, which was 400m from Gare de Lille-Europe. Too bad for us, the Gare de Lille-Europe was the station where they have lockers for bags. This round trip bag fetching made our stop here longer than planned since the station was the opposite direction we were heading, but it was all OK since we had the Eurail pass and could just catch a later train.
Lille is a very quaint French town, with narrow, cobble-stone streets and sidewalks. It was also super weird though, in that we couldn't discern where the roads where that cars drove on; we'd see cars randomly driving through plazas and what looked like sidewalks, what shambles! We walked around Lille a bit and checked out the Opera house and their cathedral, Notre Dame de la Treille.
When we wanted to grab some food, it was an awkward time of ~3 PM. We walked into a few smaller bistro/cafe type places where we saw people with food, but heard a bunch of excuses about why they couldn’t make food (all in French of course). It was a bit disheartening, because we weren’t sure if we were being profiled against. It could very well have been coincidence and bad timing, but we got a weird vibe from some of the places. We ended up finding a chain cafe that was open and grabbed some food there instead, NBD.
From Lille, we went to Amiens, which houses the Notre-Dame of Amiens Cathedral (Basilique Cathédrale Notre-Dame d’Amiens). This gothic cathedral was finished in the 13th century and is one of (if not the) biggest cathedral in Europe and is the 19th largest church in the world (thanks Wikipedia).
Amiens doesn’t have any lockers at the train station (boo), so we just hoofed it from the station to check out the cathedral and grab some food - the benefits of traveling with backpacks! During the summer, they do light shows on the outside of the cathedral, but in the off season, it was all dark. However, we could still tell that the amount of detail was pretty crazy on the face of the church; pretty impressive. Maybe next time we’ll see it in the light.
We grabbed dinner at a random bistro that was open and that had space for us to toss our bags down before we headed for our final train to Paris. Being our first dinner in France, we had to get escargots and steak frites of course!
From Amiens, we finally headed in to Paris! Paris will probably get broken up into at least 2 posts since we were there for a week and took lots and lots of pictures. Until then, à bientôt (see you soon)!
