LILLE - COLMAR BY TRAIN - Phil & Jill

Up early and a 20 minute walk to EuropeLille, the TGV station which also has a mirrored wall hotel, a department shopping mall and a Carrefour supermarket in a very new modern building. We arrived with 10 minutes to spare to catch our 8.03am train and found on the blue notice board that our train was to leave from Voie 45. Carriage 17, seats 76,77. This journey is to take 3 hours and cost 239 euros. Well what a bun fight to get on the train, loads of people with huge suitcases. By the time we got on we had missed out on putting our bag on a luggage holder. I was ok as mine is small enough to go on the rack overhead. Phil just had to leave it in a seat allocation. I had difficulty in seeing the seat numbers but a friendly young man helped me to put my case up and showed me that the small seat numbers were located in the centre pillar. So eventually we got settled. Still more to learn. Each train is different. We whizzed along for an hour and then stopped at Charles de Gaulle station. Now it became clear why so many people with huge cases.

We then continued on through large agricultural fields mainly wheat which started to change into potatoes, maize, asparagus and hops. It is a beautiful sunny blue sky day. Around our next stop of Champagne Ardenne dense forests were growing and the Alps started to be seen in the background.

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Then we entered the Alsace area and stopped at Lorraine and our stop of Colmar. The first thing you notice are the houses are painted in muted pastel colours and started to enter the vine country.

As we walked down the street it was clear that we had entered a different area by the change in architecture. We walked around 20 minutes again to our cute apartment called La Provence, 25 Boulangerie rue which was on top of a shop. Eli the owner ran the shop and showed us upstairs to a really pleasant apartment looking out on a street in the old town.

We also saw a family of storks on a nest on top of the church roof.

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It is approximately 30 years since Phil and I with Paul and Jodi but I distinctly remember it for its colour, half timbered very old buildings and its traditional dress. At first glance it doesn't seem to have changed much. It is like being in a folklore story.