Day 06

Day 06 aka Nightmare Day.

It started at the end of Day 05 when we took the night train. The seats weren't too comfortable (they were for some reason less comfortable then the day trains we've taken). Then we find out, while on the train, that the French train workers are on strike. Now when they go on strike there is still service, just reduced service. So our train, which was supposed to take us to Carcassonne, ended up taking us to Toulouse (at 4:10 AM), and we had to take another train to Carcassonne that arrived 2 hours later at 7:00 AM.

So we took the train to Carcassonne and arrived at 8:00 AM. Tyler and I are also coming down with colds (we must have picked them up from someone on the subway) and add that to the hardly any sleep and you can see that we weren't feeling too good. Anyway, we decide to book our train to Barcelona when we arrived at the Carcassonne train station, and it turns out that the train we wanted to take is completely sold out (because of the reduced service). So to get to Carcassonne, the ticket seller tells us to take a train at 11:30 AM from Carcassonne one stop down the line to Narbonne, then take another train to Port Vandres (which is also in France), and then take another train from there to Barcelona (and we will arrive at Narbonne).

Well, this kind of messed up our plans a little bit, but we decided to go see the Carcassonne castle quickly anyway. So we look for lockers for our huge packs. We can't find any lockers. So we decide to take a taxi to the fortress. We go and try to flag down taxis, but all of them are full with people already. By 10:00 AM we decide to give up as we wouldn't make it back to the station in time for our train at 11:30 AM. So the only parts of Carcassonne we saw were the train station and a little bit of the road leading from the train station.

So we get on our train to Narbonne from Carcassonne. We arrive at Narbonne and wait in line at the ticket counter for a while only to find out that the train we need to take next has been cancelled because of the strike. Now the ticket seller tells us to go from Narbonne, to Perpignon, to Port Bou, to Barcelona. We have to wait 90 minutes for our train to Perpignon and finally it arrives at 2:12 PM. We take it to Perpignon where we have to wait another 150 minutes for the train to Port Bou (a town on the France/Spain border). Perpignon was pretty nice, had palm trees, and was very warm. Our train to Port Bou finally arrived at 5:26 PM. Then we had to wait another 50 minutes for our train to Barcelona. That train departed at 7:10 PM. We finally arrived in Barcelona at 9:50 PM. Thank you France train service for going on strike! It got to the point where I thought we would never be able to get out of France and that we would have to sleep overnight in a train station somewhere because we'd be stuck. And again we were feeling sick at the same time. We were on trains and in train stations for almost 24 hours straight! Don't worry I took pictures of most of the stations and trains we were on so you can see all the different varieties we experienced (yay).

Unfortunately, we didn't get to see the UNESCO World Heritage Sight at Carcassonne, but at least we arrived safely in Barcelona. Hopefully we feel better tomorrow so that we can enjoy our first of two days in Barcelona.