Adventure to France 2023 – Day 5: Traveling to Avignon

March 29, 2023

Dear Adventure Avenue,

We got up and decided to have breakfast in the hotel buffet because we were going to be on the train during lunch, so we wanted to have a big breakfast since lunch would be of questionable gettability.

I ended up walking to the more touristy part of the Cité to the sandwich shop I’d been to before and ordered us a tomato mozzarella to split on the train.

Then we decided to go ahead and leave the hotel on the earlier side because you have to take a tiny car to the parking lot and then take a taxi to the train station. We wanted to do that early to avoid stress.

Then we waited til our train arrived and then booked it to our car which wasn’t as close as the sign said it would be.

We made it on the train and about halfway through the trip they came on the speaker and said there was an incident on car 7 and they had to evacuate it.

I thought nothing of it until I realized we’d been sitting at the station for a long time. Then I started my internet deep dive and realized our train was delayed by 15 minutes due to vandalism which instead of our 27 minute interchange in Marseille gave us 12 minutes.

I spent the rest of the train ride acquainting myself with the Marseille train station so I knew exactly where we would need to go. Luckily, I could tell the station didn’t have any stairs, making it similar to the Paris station we went out of, so assuming our platforms were relatively close together, we could make it.

I found the arrivals and departures page of the Marseille train station and kept refreshing to see what platform we would be assigned for our incoming train and our train to Avignon. It finally loaded and they were H and F. Not as close as I would’ve liked, but about as close as could be if not directly next to the incoming train.

I then quickly mapped it out on my mind, so I knew exactly where to go. We got out of our seats and waited by the exit door. As soon as the train stopped, the door opened and we took off. Sure enough, I had correctly mapped out our route and we made our way to the ticket checkpoint. They scanned our tickets with no problems and then we had to speed walk almost the entire length of the train to get to our car (we were the second from the last car).

But we made it!

Avignon was the second stop on this TGV train, so we arrived in under an hour.

We were lucky to find a taxi right away and headed to our hotel, Hôtel d’Europe. Check out my hotel tour and review post.

We got all checked in and went out to buy gifts for people.

Jeff de Bruges was our first stop. I bought some chocolates for my parents who particularly like this chocolate. Then we went to the Monoprix down the street where I bought more chocolate including my favorite milk chocolate with hazelnuts from milka.

I was hungry at this point so we stopped at a cafe and I had a citron (lemon) crepe and Perrier.