Today we’re going to make an excursion out of Lyon to the little town of Annecy. (Pronounced “an-see”). It takes about an hour and a half to get there by train, which is how we’re going. It’s about sixty miles due east of Lyon, towards the Swiss border. In fact, Annecy is only twenty miles from Geneva, Switzerland.
Annecy is in a beautiful part of the world, nestled up against the French side of the Alps. The town is located on Lake Annecy, said to be the cleanest lake in Europe. The Alps provide a majestic backdrop on the other side of the lake. The town itself is one of the most photographed towns in Europe, so with all this hype, it ought to be pretty nice. You never know, though.
We got up and went down to have something to eat in the breakfast room. Not long after that we were out the door and on our way. We took a taxi to the train station – the same train station we came to when we arrived in Lyon.
At Lyon Part Dieu Train Station
You know the train station drill by now. Buy the tickets, either from a machine or from a person at a ticket window. (We opted for the real live person). Then find one of the yellow ticket stamping machines and stamp your tickets.
They call it “composting”, not stamping, which is kind of amusing, since compost doesn’t seem to be involved in the process at all. Anyway, we stuck our tickets in the composting machine and they were stamped, validating them for the trip to Annecy.
You may recall that at train stations over here, no matter how early you get there, you can never know which track your train is going to be on until twenty minutes before departure time. At exactly twenty minutes before departure time, the information on the big board changes and track numbers appear for trains that will leave in twenty minutes.
It’s probably no big deal if you’re a regular traveler, but for us tourists, it’d be nice if a few more minutes were provided to find the track, the train, and get on board. As we waited for the twenty-minute time to come, we did some looking around so we’d know which way to go when our track showed up.
Let’s see… Tracks 1-20 are over that way. Tracks 21-33 are over in this other direction. And to get to Tracks A-G, we’d have to go to another big room next door to where we were at. OK… so we knew which way to dash, depending on what track showed up. Some of the tracks were quite a hike away, so there wouldn’t be any time to waste at “Go” time.
As we were looking up at the big board, we noticed that next to our train – the one that would ultimately end up at Grenoble – there was a little picture of a car. The only place it appeared on the board was on the row that our train was on. Why was it there? We didn’t know.
We thought that maybe it was a picture of a train, and that maybe it meant it was a special kind of train. But it didn’t really look like a train to us. I went over to get a closer look. To me, it looked like a picture of a delivery truck.
That didn’t make any sense. Well, hopefully it wouldn’t turn out to be anything that meant something to us one way or another – but of course it would.
Time to Move!
The twenty-minute mark finally rolled around. When it did, people who were leaving at the same time as us all started off in this direction and that, going to find their assigned train tracks.
But what about us? The time was up, but ours was the only row where a track number didn’t pop up. Maybe the system was slow today? We’ve ridden trains over here enough times to know that these things run like clockwork. Everything is timed right down to the second.
Still, what could we do but wait a few minutes to see if our track would show up? We waited, but no track number. Precious minutes were ticking away, and we only had twenty minutes to start with. But you know what? That funny little picture of the car was still there. Hmmmmm…
We were out of guesses, so the only thing for me to do was to ask someone. I didn’t have time to stand in line to ask someone at a window, so I’d just have to grab someone in the crowd and ask them. If you think about it, this would not be the easiest thing in the world to ask in french. What was I going to say?
“Uh… Pardon… We’re trying to get to Annecy, which is on the way to Grenoble, but our track number didn’t show up when it was supposed to, and by the way, there’s this little picture of a car or truck or something on the row that our train is listed on, and….” In french, mind you, with the clock ticking.
To be continued…
