Day 26. A try to go to Montpelier with a strike

Thursday morning I read the French news and it seemed the national strike against increasing the retirement age for the public sector from 50 years old to about 60 was about to an end. The negotiations had started on Wednesday. Also those we were on strike had already lost a week of the November salary and I though that would be quite harmful for a family budget. With all this I though it was time to move again and leave Grenoble. The idea was to spend two days in Montpellier and then two days in Marseilles. Possibly my friend Sofia could come and meet me in the week-end in Marseille since she had never been there, too.

This day was another bad luck day. I should not have left the sleeping bag :). I checked in the French national railroad site since I could not trust my Train Bible - the Thomas Cook European Time Tables. Everything was fine and I just had to travel to Lyon and take another train from there to Montpellier.








The train to Lyon was on time and the trip was quite fast, about one hour. However, in Lyon, the train station was a complete caos. I was not able to climb the stairs to reach my train to Montpelier since the previous trains had been canceled and many people were taking that train. I went to the information and there was a TGV train leaving in half an hour but there were only places on first class. That was a bit over my budget since my interrail ticket is second class and had to pay an extra supplement just to get in. I checked my book and there were still a few trains the same day from Lyon to Montpellier.


Bad luck, when asking in the informations those trains were all canceled and there was not another train this day. I checked then the trains to Marseille thinking that maybe I could go there first... but the only train had just left 10 minutes before. So after a few hours in the train station, yes in Lyon was raining heavy and I was not able to visit Lyon either, decided to try to take a train back to Grenoble. On No... there were no trains to Grenoble, too. The strike was still very strong this day. With a bit of effort I was able to find a bus alternative that I could enter with my InterRail ticket since the SNCF was paying for it.





In the end it was more then 6/7 hours in trains, busses and stations and was back to the first place again :)

Time to have dinner, sleep and try again in the next day :P