Goodbye to Nice, Bonjour to Paris!

Goodbye to Nice, Bonjour to Paris! Traveling from Nice to Paris
Friday 6/25/2010
So, we had printed e-mail confirmations of e-tickets from Nice, France to Paris. We let the boys sleep in late in this comfortable motel (with 2 rooms), and after the boys got up, Mary stayed behind while I walked to the train station and tried to get the actual tickets. I was unsuccessful this time as I stood in lines, tried e-machines that wouldn’t work with my credit card, and gave up after about an hour so I ran back to the hotel as I was running out of time.
I was hot and tired, but we dragged the family and our bags to the train station, and I stood in line again while Josh sat with the bags and Mary and Nate went across the street for take-out Chinese food for the trip.
The clerk at the ticket window told me there had been rain water over tracks somewhere, and the scheduled 7 minutes between trains wasn’t enough time to change trains in Toulon, France. So we were able to go on another train an hour earlier hoping all our connections would be right. On the train, clerks told us to not get off the train in Toulon, but instead go on to Marcelles.
…
I am now writing while on a high speed TGV train, advertised in the magazine on board as going 320 kmh. It was posted in our e-mail when we bought these tickets on-line as going 185 mph. It doesn’t feel that fast, but it is very modern, it is moving fast, and when I could see a distant highway (like one of our Interstate highways), we were certainly moving well-faster that the fastest vehicles.
I’m looking out the window, traveling north from Marseille, France to Paris, France, through Avignon and other towns (and making very few stops since this is a high-speed train). We fly past ancient looking churches in the countryside, past electrical-generating windmills, past nuclear power plants … what a time-warp!
Todd