AubrysInFrance: Day three of our short, out-of-town bike adventure

Sunday June 9

The next morning, Roger and I got up fairly early so we could breakfast and get to the train station in plenty of time to make our preferred train leaving at a little before 9:30AM. No rain, but very threatening. There were several other bikers at the station, and we discovered to our dismay that we indeed needed bike reservations. The ticket office did not open until afternoon, but Roger found a train system official who confirmed that yes, we needed a reservation, and no, none was available on the train we hoped to catch. He did suggest lining up and seeing if we would be allowed on board. We were also informed that one had to book online to get a bike reservation, which we could not do at this time. It would appear that in the future we are going to have schedule and book our trains before taking the bike trip, so we will have to adhere to a schedule revolving around our pre-purchased ticket with bike reservation.

Valence Ville Gare

We went out to the platform with our bikes and found a number of other people with bikes in the same boat – tickets with no bike reservation. This included some folks who had had tickets the day before, only to discover the tickets were for a train that stopped at a station some miles away – the tickets were non-refundable so they were out more than 200 euros. They then bought tickets for the bus run by the train system, that said bikes were allowed, only to be told by the bus driver that bikes were NOT allowed. So, our problems began to seem a bit smaller.

The train arrived, the people with bikes and reservations got aboard, and the rest of us were lined up hopefully. The wonderful lady on the train asked if we had tickets – we said yes; she asked if we had bike reservations – we said no. She looked around, looked down the train car, and motioned for us all to get aboard, for which we thanked her profusely. All of us managed to squeeze our bikes and bags into more-or-less out of the way spaces and settled down for the hour-and-45-minute ride to Lyon, praising the railroad woman for her kindness and thanking our luck for bailing us out.