Choosing a Choo Choo

Current mental soundtrack: "Beautiful Is the World" from Siddartha Fragments, by Jude Navari

Today's pre-Europe adventure was booking train travel. Twenty-one days in Europe, two countries, six travel days, sounds like a six-day Eurail France-Italy Saver pass is the way to go. But wait! The best way to get from Lyon to Venice (according to the schedule) is overnight. Since there's a change of trains after 7:00 pm, that counts as two days on the pass. Does that mean we need a seven-day pass? Well, no, because we can just buy tickets from Venice to Florence for less than the cost of an additional day on the pass, so we're back to the six-day pass. (I don't know how many hours of online research it took for me to be able to write this paragraph, but it was quite a few!)

I ended up purchasing a six-day Saver pass for four, reserved seats for three on the TGV from Paris to Lyon (DH will already be there), and two double-sleepers for the Lyon-Venice overnight leg. It's too early to reserve the other overnight leg (Rome to Paris), and we're going to wing it for the shorter daytime trips in Italy.

Naturally, after buying these, I found one snag in my plans: In order to use our Saver pass for the family, all four have to be present to validate the pass before use. In other words, DH is going to have to take the TGV from Lyon BACK to CDG to meet us before any of us can use the pass to get to Lyon!

At least the credit card company didn't blink at the charge...