Another long travel day from Dinan to Frankfurt, starting at 7:30am and finishing at 6:30pm. Our first train, to Dol de Bretagne, left and arrived on time, as it has for the four times we have now used it. The connection to Rennes arrived 10 minutes late because of a signal problem at St Malo, where it had started. It got to Rennes seven minutes late, which was not a problem, as we had time to spare there. We sat at a cafe for a drink and Lyn was taken by the lighting in the shop, which was reflected in a steel curved mirror.
The TGV from Rennes left on time but stopped at Le Mans (home of the 24 hour race) because of a mechanical problem in the carriage next to us. It arrived in Paris Montparnasse 25 minutes late. While reading Les Miserables on this trip, Malcolm learned about the time Jean Valjean was mugged on a lonely road in Austerlitz by a strapping twenty year old professional thief. J.V. did the Crocodile Dundee thing and turned the tables on the mugger, thrashing him, then giving him a long lecture based on his own life as a convict, before giving him his purse filled with money. This was in the hope that the lad would respond as J.V. had done to the generosity of the bishop he stole from. The name of the thief was Montparnasse.
We had planned to catch Line 4 Metro to Paris L'Est, but our connection time was now only 50 minutes so we turned to Plan B, which we had researched on Wednesday. We knew from then where the taxi rank was and jumped straight into a cab driven by a quiet African man who drove very safely through the horrendous traffic. One of the first signs we saw in Paris was "Austerlitz". He got us to the German ICE train for Frankfurt with five minutes to spare. We still do not like Paris, because there are too few places where you can get away from the sirens, the horns and the crowds of pedestrians. We took three photos from the taxi, one of the Seine and Notre Dame and another of a tower we cannot recognise.
As we climbed aboard we were blocked by two guards trying to remove a drunk man from the train and he was threatening them with a bottle as they manhandled him off past us.
The ICE reached speeds of 320km/hour in France but when we were near Germany it took a detour through Strasburg to avoid track work and arrived one and a half hours late, causing long announcements in three languages to adjust connections in Mannheim and Frankfurt. It was a long trip of five and a half hours from Paris but we got here unscathed, that is the main thing. Our Munchener Hotel was easy to walk to and is very comfortable. We went back to the station to the Reisezentrum where a burly ticket seller with a deep, gruff voice took our plans for the next two weeks and whizzed through the reservations and travel plans in a few minutes. Another big step forward for our trip.
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