Travel Planning

This was the most fun - planning an excursion which was largely mental work and searching the internet for alternate ways to get to the starting point that I had chosen at St Jean Pied de Port in the south of France. I discovered a lot of information on the internet under various locations regarding train travel in Europe and most inportantly how to connect between the airports and the train routes.

As it turned out, I chose the best way to get to the south of France by flying into Paris and then taking two trains to St Jean Pied de Port. What I learned is that while St Jean appears closer to Spain on the map, the connection by train is awkward because the rail lines are dissimilar and do not run in straight north south directions across the countries. More choice seems to be available to arrive in Paris then choose a short flight to a city in the south or just get to the train station in Paris and ride through the beautiful vistas of the south of France.

It was easy to find my way through the Charles de Gaule airport as there are information stations everywhere and people are most helpful even with a little bit of French. Finding the metro into Paris was easy, getting a ticket from the machine with my visa card done with a little assistance from someone standing nearby and then following the directions and the metro stops to get to the centre of the city was not a problem at all. The train station I needed was about 3 blocks from the metro station and this was negotiated quickly with help from people on the street.

What I did not do well was to leave myself enough time between flight arrival and train departure and so with less than 2 hours - I made my train connection with literally minutes to spare. The ticket I was able to get through the internet was first class (very cheap) and was a real treat for the 5 hours it took to get to Bayonne where I transfered to the smaller older train that took us through the mountains to St Jean.

The challenge is to plan your flight to arrive at a time when you can make train connections required to get to the final destination - a real stroke of luck I discovered with limited times in between transfers.

On the return journey, I had only booked my return flight from Paris and was not sure how I would get from there Santiago. The frustration during the early part of the walk was knowing that I had a deadline of getting to Paris within 35 days and it was not until I realized in about the second week that I would complete the walk in the time alloted that I was able to settle down and stop worrying about this. I also had a bit of a challenge trying to figure out how to book a flight during my walk between Santiago and Paris and ended up getting my daughter to do this for me from Canada. All worked out and it was very easy, although because I left it so late, probably more expensive to book this flight than it could have been if I had chosen this route much earlier. I had it in my mind that I might want to take a train all the way back to Paris, but the time did not allow me to do this.

I took on the travel arrangements as kind of an adventure in exploring options and learned a lot about travel in Europe along the way, more about the geography of France and certainly gained a lot of confidence in being able to sort out how to plan this trip from start to finish for myself.

There are a variety of ways to organize the travel plan and many destinations to head for from North America and from Eurpoe as a matter of fact, so in searching out what will work for you is filled with lots of options.

Maggee