Fail tale

For your entertainment, here’s the tale of my epic fail while travelling to the 2012 Alpe d’Huez Triathlon. The plan was simple: on Monday morning get the Eurostar to Paris, then the TGV to Grenoble, pick up a hire car and drive to Alpe d’Huez, spend a day eating baguettes and then the next day doing the race, then back to the UK on the Thursday. Previous experience told me that taking a bike on the Eurostar is difficult because you have to check it in specially and the last time I tried this the staff at the bike check in were so dilatory that I almost missed the train. I therefore borrowed a hard bike case from the club, packed my new Bianchi into it, everything else in a rucksack and headed off.

All went well until I got to King’s Cross, where I noticed that one of the wheels on the bike case had broken. This meant that instead of rolling along it was just scraping on the floor. Since the whole thing weighed almost 25kg there was no way I could carry it, so I just had to drag it through the miles of passages that take you to the Eurostar terminal. There were trolleys at the terminal, though, so when I'd got one of them things were easy and the trip to the Gare du Nord was pleasant and largely incident free. So far so good.

Once there, however, an obstacle presented itself: I had to get to the Gare de Lyon with my giant heavy one-wheeled bike case, and I only had 50 minutes to do it. It’s just a few km and an easy journey on the Metro, but not with a giant heavy box that you have to drag along the floor. No way am I going on the Metro with that, thought I, I’ll just get a taxi. This proved to be an error. To start with, the taxi drivers simply refused to take me because the case was too big. I’m not sure why it was too big, it goes quite easily in the average estate car, but I spent about 10 minutes enjoying a repertoire of shrugs, face-pulling and in some cases downright rudeness. Eventually I found a taxi driver who would take me, loaded up his cab and off we went, straight into complete gridlock. The driver seemed more concerned with changing lanes as often as humanly possible than with getting me to the station. I anxiously watched the time and tried to hurry things along but Monsieur le Taxi was not to be rushed. The taxi rank at the Gare de Lyon was chaos and he spent about 5 minutes trying to find a space, and when he did he got out and started shouting at another driver who’d cut him up, rather than taking the money I needed to give him so that I could get on with things. 7 minutes left.

Dragging the Box of Doom behind me I ran into the station. Found the departure board. There it is: platform 21. Onto the station concourse I ran. I looked for platform 21, but something was wrong... all the platforms had letters, not numbers. I looked back at the departure board: yes, platform 21 for the TGV to Grenoble, but all the other trains had letters, not numbers. I looked around and eventually saw a sign to platforms 5-23, and off I ran, dragging my box and scattering dogs, women and small children in my wake. 5 minutes.

I made my way down the corridor indicated by the sign, heart rate hitting the 180s, and round the corner into… the ticket hall. Which is big, full of people in queues and has no train platforms. Not even any with letters. Sweat dripping into my eyes I looked around and eventually found another sign directing me ne the other side of the ticket hall, so off I ran again, the juggernaut of desolation that was the bike box scraping along the stone floor behind me, crashing through the queues, pushing pregnant women aside and kicking nuns, small children and kittens out of the way. 4 minutes.

Past the sign, and out into another station concourse, with numbers instead of letters this time. There is platform 21 in front of me. I put the hammer down and with 3 minutes to go I was on the platform. The train was there, and the doors were open. I could see the finish line and as I launched my final sprint I could hear a choir launching into the Halleluja Chorus. Confetti cannons were firing, cheerleaders were waving their pompoms and the announcer was going crazy… until SNCF woman, 5’4” in her spike heels and featuring a particularly chic coiffure stepped out between me and the promised land.

“Votre billet monsieur”.

Christ, where’s my ticket? In my rucksack. I shrugged it off, dived into the top pocket, grabbed the ticket and gave it to her. She took a loooong, slow look at it. “Ce n’est pas correct, m’sieur”. Oh *****, I’ve given her the return half. Back into the rucksack to get the other part of the ticket. She slowly took it from me and slowly, unsmilingly, carefully examined it… until the train doors sniiiicked closed. She smiled at last and gave me the ticket back. “Vous êtes trop tard”. I pointed out that there were still 2 minutes, but my pleas fell on deaf ears. It was made quite clear that even if I were Napoleon reincarnated, accompanied by the ghosts of Jeanne d'Arc and Charles de Gaulle there’s no way I’d get on the train now. I slowly sank to the floor by the Giant Bike Box Whose Name Is Calamity. SNCF woman paid me no more regard than any of the other pieces of litter scattered on the floor. Merde.

OK, what now. I went back to the ticket office, ignored the scattered bodies left by my previous passing and, after a while in a queue, determined that a) the next train or Grenoble doesn’t leave for 3 hours, b) No I couldn’t use my ticket on it and c) I couldn't get a new ticket anyway because all the seats were booked (at least I think that’s the reason, my not very good French was breaking down somewhat by this point). OK, what other options are there? I got the phone out, shelled out some money for international data access and found that not only am I not getting the train to Grenoble that day, I’m also not flying unless I wanted to do some very serious damage to my credit card. There was, however, a seat available on an Easyjet flight back to London for an amount of money that is only eye-wateringly painful. Tossing up the relative merits of finding a hotel room (all the while accompanied by the Great Big Box of Desolation) and flying back to London I was suddenly filled with an urge to just go home, and have a beer, and not have to drag this stupid, heavy box around any more Parisian train stations. So I did.