We were out of the apartment a bit before 9:00 and we headed up to the school where we and many of the other students caught a cab that took us to the train station. When we arrived in Paris we needed to transfer from our station (Bercy) to Gard du Nord. We didn’t have a transfer…the plan was to take a taxi. Wasn’t a taxi to be found at the train station. And a nearby hotel said “no way” (Olympics).
Fortunately,
George, one of our fellow students, was with us so he called Uber. We had to walk a couple of blocks as the
roads were closed around the station. We
had plenty of time to get to Gard du Nord.
Unfortunately, we headed out only to find closed street after closed
street (again, the Olympics). The driver
finally had to hit the ring road, where we ran into major traffic.
Back on surface streets we drove to and around the Arc de Triomphe.
We missed our train to Amsterdam by at least 45 minutes. Fortunately, they just did a simple ticket exchange for us, so no headaches and no money lost.
We found a Five Guys burger place in the station so we had dinner there. American comfort food.
The topping on the delays, we ended up sitting at a train station somewhere in the north of France for a long time, plus some shorter stops in other places. The high-speed rail system had been targeted by terrorist groups at the start of the Olympics and that affected the operation of many trains for several days as the authorities worked on security measures.
We did get a lovely sunset...so that is at least something.
Our 3 ½ hour ride turned into 7+ hours. We got to bed really late.
Fortunately for him, Paul had no delays getting to Amsterdam. After checking into the hotel he took a bit of a walk around parts of nearby Amsterdam.
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