Our Thello Train from Paris to Venice
Well, it was finally time to say goodbye to the beautiful city of Paris. I must admit that I didn’t really get to appreciate much of Paris since we were too busy rushing from one place to another. This amazing race type of vacation isn’t very nice. If it were up to me, I probably wouldn’t have included Paris in this trip or at least spend a week here instead of the four days we did. From our apartment in Paris we took a metro to the major railway station of Gare de Lyon. This is where our train will be departing. The Gare de Lyon Railway station looks much like the Gare de l’Est which we used to go to the medieval town of Provins in the outskirt of Paris. This time we would be taking another train and will finally be leaving France altogether.
Our Small But Clean Train Cabin
From one beautiful city to another, we will be going to the Italian city of Venice. We purchased tickets for an overnight train ride, and I think this will be my first overnight train ride in a while. I was surprised that they even offered this route since it was quite far and it is possible that flying would be faster and cheaper. However, it is also an experience to travel overnight by train. All of my overnight train rides have been in China and I have never been able to book a sleeper berth. This resulted in extremely uncomfortable 12 hour rides. Our train was operated by the Italian company Thello and it seems like the train was quite full. There were a lot of youngsters on the train. It seems like they are going to some field trip. How I envy them to be able to travel freely like this. Hopefully, I would be able to do the same thing in the near future.
Our cabin was actually for six people with three beds on each side. Fortunately, we didn’t have to share the cabin with strangers as we had it all to ourselves. Two of my companions get motion sickness very easily, terrible if you love traveling, so they got the bottom berths. I didn’t mind the top berth except that there were cold air blowing from the window. A train staff collected our passports and returned them the next day. I didn’t know why they needed to collect them since we were within the Schengen area. Anyway, we went to bed quite early, it was a long day and we deserved some rest.
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