zoom in   /   zoom out   /   fit images to window size

Tuesday 1st August 2006 - Journey from Banstead to St Gervais in the French Alps

Our journey started with a drive from home to Dover where we left the car in long-term parking and boarded a ferry to Calais. The crossing was pleasant and uneventful. At Calais, we got ourselves and our miscellaneous rucksacks onto a bus from the port to the Calais Ville railway station, ready for our first train journey of this inter-rail holiday. Our plan was to travel to Paris Gare du Nord, take the metro round to Paris Gare de Lyon in the south east of the city, take a train down to Lyon and then further south and east to Chamonix in the Alps. We *almost* managed to stick to the plan as well. But by the time we got to Lyon, we couldn't get a train that would take us all the way to Chamonix. We considered staying in a hotel in Lyon and resuming our journey the next day, but in the end decided to take one last train as far into the Alps as we could get and ended up in St Gervais, which is only 45 minutes by train from Chamonix, so we did pretty well. On arrival in St Gervais it was getting on for midnight but we were fortunate in finding a reasonable hotel quite close to station and had a good night's sleep.

Bekky with the white(ish) cliffs of Dover in the background

Our first train, from Calais to Paris. The female Woolleys had opted for luggage that had wheels as well as straps that allowed them to be carried like a standard rucksack, whilst Jack had a new Berghaus 50 litre rucksack. Martin, meanwhile, had a massive 145 litre "haul bag" which contained his clothes etc for the 3 weeks plus two tents, four sleeping bags, sleeping mats, lighting and so on. Yes, it was heavy!