Hit me with your meteorite Toulouse, France

The trip on a fast, clean French train to Toulouse was a nice break from the chaos, even if I did spend it planning how to get to Andorra. We alighted to the sounds of classical piano, not on the speaker, no, a real piano at the station that allowed any commuter who was blessed with the gift of music to share the love. Argh now I feel like I’m in France. What could possibly go wrong?

Keeley and I as you know we fight regularly and I feel she is rarely present which is like many teenagers. while I was looking for ways out of Toulouse she stated that ‘there is a train that goes in 30 minutes to Paris that’s only €15.00”. I replied ‘that is cheap’ not believing my ears. Well we have nowhere to sleep there so I will do some research and we can get the next one if you really want to go, and I knew she did, Paris was her number one. Nothing else mattered and to be honest it did seem silly from a logistics perspective to go backwards towards Spain to see Andorra when it was only 2 or 3 hours to the fabulous Paris. I just felt that my love of Spain was dying along with my money and my concern for the future of this journey into ourselves was coming to an abrupt end thanks to Bad Barry.

I agreed let’s go, we ran to the ticket box to be told that was a rare deal that occasionally comes up, we can get the next train which was in 2 hours, planning to buy the ticket at the last possibly moment so as to snap up the cheap tickets. 15 minutes before the train was to depart we were checking every second on the ticket machine and the prices were just going up, now over €110 each. Feeling like a stockbroker on the last day of a massive sell off on Wall Street, I Inserted my visa card, declined. Insert the card, declined. Insert the card, declined. I did this swearing and red faced with a crowd behind me I repeated this 4 times and then keeley tried another machine and card, all bloody declined. I ran to the counter and started begging for service, the calm and very karen like lady took my money which had now skyrocketed to €120 per person. I would never eat again, not even cheese.

But this stage we had missed the train anyway and would have to wait for the next one, we had already been at Toulouse train station for nearly 6 hours, and we smelt like rubbish. The worst coffee and below tolerable wifi added to the pain. We checked our 80kg bags in at a local hotel who took the painstaking amount of $40aus off us just to have three bags in a room.

We needed to eat, so heading into town we walked in circles for half an hour until miserable, hungry, tired and smelly we realised we were going in the wrong direction. We ended up back at the damn station again. Ahh home again, says Keeley with a satanic laughs while the security guards said hello ladies with a welcome they only offer to friends. We set off to find something edible that didn’t cost a kidney. We had one more wine and keeley ran back to the station to check on things and made a mate with a lovely air traffic controller who worked for the airforce, who was like a walking Valium.

So we finally boarded, got our PJ’s on and settled into bed, it was a super cure and cosy 4 bed room with eye mask and all! Minutes later we heard a knock at our door. You need to disembark ladies, so getting dressed again and packing all our belongings I just could not believe our bad luck, how much worse can it get?

Well much worse as the train wasn’t leaving.
We got off to thunder, lighting and torrential downfall, in dark with no toilet at midnight with hundreds of others. Apparently there was an issue and the were finding a hotel for us for the night. Seeing the old, the blind (not making this up), the pregnant mothers and young toddlers, we decided with Mr Valium to wait until they all had been processed. By time we got to the counter at 2.30 am we were told to get back on the train and sleep for the night. We had a cabin of 4 bunks (thanks covid) so offered one to Mr Valium, he accepted with the calm and gracious demeanor we had become accustomed to.

At the office when asking why we couldn’t get a refund or upgrade Jaime explained that it wasn’t their fault a meteorite had hit. Seriously, this is a true story. We got the next sleeper train to Paris 12 hours later. Lucky I had a mate who I had met in Melbourne years earlier at the Moonlight Cinema who would be happy to host us.