Toronto to Carcassonne

March 30, 2022

Spring had been the official season for almost two weeks when I left Toronto on my journey to Carcassonne, France, via London, England.

I had flown overnight from Toronto to London (can you fly from Toronto to London at any other time?) and then finished my journey to Carcassonne by train. I was tackling this longer than usual itinerary to prove to myself that my physical stamina remained undiminished following my 78th birthday— and also because I like trains. It promised to be memorable and so it was, but mostly because of the bone-biting, finger-and-toe-numbing cold all along the exhausting, two-night-long journey.

Thanks to the benefits of a long lockdown and the accumulation of BMO Rewards points, my transatlantic flight was a class or two above my usual. I was therefore more comfortable and able to sleep for a few hours. I felt rested when I woke for the descent into London’s Gatwick Airport the next morning.

March 31, 2022

Gatwick Airport was its usual industrious bustle, but I was pleased to see the automatic passport control now accepted Canadian passports. On this occasion, I was using my British passport, but I filed that information away for other visits. (Earlier trips had meant long queues if you weren’t an EU passport holder. Now the EU passport holders were the ones lining up.)

One striking difference in the arrival and passport control area this time was the signage hanging from the ceiling announcing that all face masks had to be removed, presumably to make facial recognition easier at the risk of spreading disease. So, having worn a mask for the previous several hours at the airport in Toronto and during the flight, I found my mask was no longer required and not even permitted, regardless of the need for it. I took off my KN95 with great pleasure as my ears were developing grooves where they join my scalp. Merging with the several hundred similarly unmasked, and possibly vulnerable, travellers, I passed quickly through the automated gate system.

Since I had only my carry-on luggage, I headed straight for the South Terminal, where the train station was, and purchased a ticket for St Pancras from the machine. The 10:04 Thameslink train had just left, so I had to wait 15 minutes on platform four. It was barely above freezing and I could feel sleet or snow in the air, if not see it on the ground.

Once at St Pancras, I mooched around the shops for a while, buying Doe some of her favourite disposable fountain pens at the little stationery shop and locating the toilets (valuable information for a man of my age). I was hoping to find a pasty shop, but only found a Greggs bake shop. Their steak bake is nothing like a Cornish pasty — just ask the people in Truro, after the company announced last year it would open a bake shop in the Cornish capital. All the same, lacking anything better, a Greggs cheese and onion bake and a coffee warmed me up.

Because my train wasn’t until late afternoon, I had to pass several hours in the concourse before I could enter the Eurostar waiting area. The chilly plastic seating could not have been much warmer than sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park. It was, however, a lot noisier. The upright pianos placed in railway stations around Europe are an invitation to any amateur pianist to bash out a tune, and many do. From the refined young lady stumbling valiantly through Chopin’s waltz in A flat major (an old party piece of mine when I used to play) to the most Rastafarian reincarnation of Elvis I have seen, belting out “Blue Suede Shoes”, I was treated to music (I use the term lightly) to suit all tastes, or none.

An hour and a half before departure, the gates opened. Those of us not in “Business Premier” had to join the lengthy line to pass through baggage check and border control (one for leaving the UK and one for entering the European Union within metres of each other). The few “Business Premier” passengers I saw — all young men in tracksuits who seemed to be part of a team — went straight through security and had their own private area to relax in before boarding.

Inside the Eurostar departure lounge, I could no longer hear the piano playing and enjoyed the (slightly) warmer and (slightly) more comfortable conditions while waiting for the 16:30 Eurostar for Paris Gare du Nord. It wasn’t long, however, before the platform announcement came and we travellers could trail up the two long ramps towards the section of the platform designated for each numbered coach. I was near the front of the train so had quite a walk, but once on board I found my window seat to be comfortable and the meal served shortly after departure both generous and delicious.

Dusk was falling as I travelled through French Flanders and its principal city, Lille, and into the plains of Picardy. Looking out on the flat countryside with its scattered farms, I was taken back to my first train journey into this area over 55 years ago, when Monsieur Blot met me at the station in Creil. His wife, Elizabeth, was the English teacher at the Collège St Maximin, near Chantilly. She was expecting a baby shortly, so she had asked Professor Collas, the head of French at Queen Mary University of London and her old teacher, to recommend someone to take her classes during the residential summer school. I was the lucky person he asked, so I was on my way to be a substitute English teacher for a bunch of hyperactive and often troubled teenage boys. In those days I crossed the channel by ferry as a foot passenger and took the Paris train from Calais. What rich memories I had of my brief time in St Maximin! I borrowed a Solex — a bicycle with auxiliary power provided by a motor you could drop onto the front wheel — and put-putted all around the area: medieval Senlis, the wooded countryside around Compiègne, and, of course, the beautiful château and its park in Chantilly. I even made it to Paris on one occasion, although by the time I got there, it was time to turn around and go back to St Maximin.

My reflections on the two sunny summers I had spent at St Maximin continued until the train pulled into the bustling but ugly Gare du Nord station in Paris. Unlike London’s St Pancras, this station is still awaiting renovation and looks weary of the wait.

Leaving the platform, I turned left and went down the steps to buy a single metro journey ticket at the machine. A bold M5 clearly marked Metro line 5, direction Place d’Italie and this line would take me directly to the Gare d’Austerlitz, and my night train to Toulouse.

The metro platform was crowded, and I kept my back to a closed kiosk so that I wouldn’t get bustled into the path of an oncoming train. There were even more people on the train than on the platform, but that didn’t stop a few of us near the doors from squeezing on board. We jostled precariously, hanging on to the handrails, until the train disgorged some of its human cargo at République, and considerably more at Bastille.

Like the Gare du Nord, the Gare d’Austerlitz looks shabby and unloved. It, too, is being renovated and will doubtless be presentable for visitors to Paris for the 2024 Olympics. Both projects have antagonized Parisians opposed to the commercial and retail centres that are deemed essential to any modern transportation hub. The demonstrations have been disruptive, but, unusually in my experience, all the trains in this journey ran on time.

When I reached the cabin and saw the sleeping arrangements, I wish I had forked out for first class. Notwithstanding the lack of flexibility in my aging joints, I got into the middle couchette of three (there are six in each second-class compartment). Finally settled in my SNCF sleeping bag, someone asked me to move so that a group of men travelling together could be in the same compartment. I got into the bottom couchette in the next compartment and pretended to be asleep when the other travellers arrived. There was a family of three, mother, father, and a boy of perhaps five or six, and a young woman who had booked the bottom couchette opposite me. For safety’s sake, the boy was supposed to have had the bottom couchette that I had commandeered, but he begged his father to let him sleep further up the ladder. After some cajoling, he got his way, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Pianissimo.

April 1, 2022

Then the young woman started working on her laptop. She sat on the floor and spread her papers all around her, using the couchette as a makeshift desk. Apart from the annoying tapping at the keyboard, I knew this would be a problem for me since I would probably have to go to the toilet more than once during the night. There was no way I could leave the compartment without disturbing her. As it was, I held out until almost two o’clock before I had to ask her to gather her papers so that I could get by. She did so reluctantly, and moved to the couchette, where she sat cross-legged for another couple of hours. Later, when I had to go again, she picked up the last of her papers from the floor and got into her sleeping bag. The head of the boy’s father in the middle couchette was right next to the door latch, so that each time I opened and closed the compartment door during the night, the noise made him start. He kept his eyes closed, however, and seemed to fall back to sleep quickly.

I think only the boy had slept well when we reached Toulouse about seven in the morning, and, perhaps, his mother, who had the top couchette. I certainly hadn’t.

At Toulouse, I had a quarter of an hour to change platforms for the Carcassonne train. This was the usual clean, comfortable suburban milk-run train I had taken so many times before. I enjoyed the view from the window as the morning sun revealed the fertile Lauragais countryside west of Carcassonne.

I reached Carcassonne at about eight o’clock and was disappointed to find the sky overcast and the air distinctly chilly. The cold, damp weather of London and Paris was to linger in the south of France for several more days, with just the occasional day-long foray into spring-like temperatures. But I had arrived!

Now to see what the builders had done to our apartment.