St Emilion

I was reading one of my favourite travel blogs, Picnic at The Cathedral and WOB’s hilarious reflections on missing a bus in Poland  and was immediately reminded of missing a train in Bordeaux on Bastille weekend and the repercussions of missing that one train!

Some years age my favourite person and I were traveling through Europe with our youngest daughter, who was about fifteen at the time.

We had arranged a train trip from Bordeaux to Taormina. Yes I  know, this involves going across the water and trains don’t normally travel over water, but in Italy they sort of do! They barge the carriages from the mainland across to Messina and then you continue your journey. We thought it sounded like fun.

St Emilion

Back to the story. We were staying in St Emilion and needed to drive back to Bordeaux railway station to drop the car off and then board the train to Paris, travel across Paris to catch another train to Amalfi where we’d planned a couple of days sightseeing before re-boarding the train to travel onto Taormina. As I write this it now seems so obvious it wasn’t going to be straight forward but I didn’t expect it to turn sour even before we boarded our train in Bordeaux.

After a delightful Saturday morning in St Emilion, we allowed ourselves what we considered to be a more than ample time (two and half hours) to get to the Bordeaux train station. I allowed this time because the previous year I’d been in Bordeaux for work and seen how busy the traffic was.

So all packed and seemingly with plenty of time, we loaded the address into the GPS and set off for the station. Continue reading →