Description: Pictures, and a few words to go with them
Des is besotted with overnight trains. Before the Moscow to Paris Express, we’d taken just two overnighters – Serco’s Caledonian Sleeper from London to Inverness, and Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited from Boston to Chicago. A principal requirement for this trip was to take an overnight train somewhere in Europe. When Des and I go to Europe, we usually spend a couple of days on an adventure but now that he’s a little older, it made sense to do something really special. So, sometime in March, Des and I sat around
Our first plan had us traveling by train to London (from Prestatyn, near where my dad lives), then Paris on the Eurostar, then an overnight train, one of the few, to a small town in the Pyrenees named Andorre-L’Hospitalet . From there, we’d take a bus into Andorra, the small Pyrenean principality. It was a plan Des and I were particularly excited about yet ultimately had to scrap. It was just too much. Getting to the south of Spain from the Pyrenees is not easy since there are no trains in Andorra. We would
We were frustrated, and we were spinning our wheels, so we reverse engineered the plan a little. We knew we wanted to spend time at the beach, and we knew which day we would have to leave to come back to Massachusetts so we worked backwards from there. The gateway to the south of Spain by train from the rest of Europe is Barcelona, that’s the only option. And, the only effective way to get to Barcelona, speedily, is from Paris. That meant we needed to be in Paris by at least 2:20pm on the Friday to make th