DAY 30: The Journey to Paris

 Saturday, May 6, 2023

The plan was to drive to Lyon, drop off the car, have lunch, and catch the TGV at about 3 PM. The drive to Lyon was about 10% on local roads and the balance on the A7 Freeway. Google maps estimates the drive to be just under 3 hours, but we had driven on the A7 when we arrived and seen a lot of  bad traffic. I am a bit of a nervous traveler these days so we planned to leave at 9AM and have 6 hours for the drive and lunch.

Traffic jams on the A7 seem a bit strange. You can be ripping along at 120km/hr and then all the traffic slows, crawls and stops. If you are lucky a few minutes later is starts to move and all of a sudden you are back at 120km/hr. This happened a dozen times when we arrived, and it turned a 3 hour drive into 6 hours. Yet we have never seen evidence of an accident or road work or whatever.

We had a couple of these stoppages but they only added about 30 minutes. We initially had the wrong address for the car rental location (they had moved two years ago but did not change the address on their website) and that added a bit of stress but we made it with plenty of time for lunch.

Right on time.

We had First Class seats on the TGV so that was a bit of a treat. I had a carafe of Rose to sip as we tore along at 300 km/hr. Pretty cool. 

I had chosen a hotel close to the city and the main subway station (Chatelet-Les Halles) that was a bit too far to walk, so we got a cab to the hotel.