Train adventures

 A holiday weekend.  A train strike.  And yet somehow, I expected smooth sailing.  HA!
 
The ticket said: Angouleme - Poitiers, change trains, Poitiers - Tours.  "Oh, how easy," I thought, ever the optimist.  It was supposed to take just under 2 hours, a quick and easy voyage.

Oh, how wrong I was!

Well, the Angouleme - Poitiers part went as planned, but it was 5 minutes late, giving me about 8 minutes to catch my connecting train to Tours.  I hustled off the platform and went over to the arrivals/departures board.  There was no train that said "Tours".  So I looked up the number of the train (just in case Tours was only a stop along the way, and not the final destination)...no train.  I tried to look for a train that was leaving at the time my train was supposed to leave...no train.  So I found a SNCF official, and had this helpful conversation.

Me: excuse me, sir, but I'm looking for the 19:13 train to Tours.
Him: there isn't one.
Me: But...it says on my ticket there is one.  *points to ticket* see?  this one?
Him: Non.
Me: Non?
Him: Non.
Me: What do you mean, there isn't one?
Him: Exactly.
Me: Is there a later one?
Him: No.  What you want to do is take the 19:54 train to Saint-Pierre-des-Corps.
Me: *slightly desperately* But I don't want to go to Saint-Pierre-des-Corps.  I want to go to Tours.
Him: Well, you can get from Saint-Pierre-des-Corps to Tours.
Me: OK...thank you...

I found another employee and had basically the same conversation.  I made a desperate plea to Gwenaëlle: "help me, I might have to spend the rest of my life in Poitiers, DO SOMETHING!", and she worked her magic and informed me that there was a train from Saint-Pierre-des-Corps to Tours about 15 minutes after my train would get to the station.  Why the train station employees couldn't give me this information, we'll never know, but at least I had a tangible goal in mind at this point.  I went to the platform for the 19:54 train...delayed by 20 minutes!  (I used this time to lose my ticket, panic, try unsuccessfully to get a new one, then find my ticket where it had been in my bag all along.  Whoops.)  But it came, and I got a seat across from a very friendly woman who I shanghaied into having a conversation with me about how difficult it is to get from Angoulême to Tours.  She said to me, "you know, the train lines are laid out like a star from Paris.  It's easy to get to Paris from anywhere, but it's not always easy to travel between two other places...it might have been easier for you to just go to Paris and then head back to Tours". 

The arrow is pointing to Poitiers, the midpoint of this voyage.  Also, you can see that Angoulême and Tours really, truly, aren't that far apart! It should have been a straight shot!

She was kidding (I think), but she actually wasn't that far off.  My "easy" 2-hour train trip ended up taking over 3.5 hours.  If I had gone to Paris, then back to Tours, it would have taken slightly longer, but been a hell of a whole lot easier.  And I wouldn't have had to ride that terrifying train from Saint-Pierre-des-Corps to Tours, which went about 5 miles per hour and seemed like it was about to fall apart.  But I made it!

I don't know if this adventure was because of the strike, the holiday weekend, or both.  I will say this, though: problems (actually, I prefer the term "adventures") are way easier to deal with when you have 30 pounds of luggage, versus like 100 pounds.  At least I had that in my favor this time!