A terrifically stressful journey from the Netherlands ended successfully yesterday afternoon with our arrival in Southern France at our first French HelpX host. We left Michiel's dad's house in the darkness of early morning but I hadn't really factored in enough time to de-ice the car so poor papa had to race to get us to the train station in time.
We made it, but the high speed train to Paris had so many mechanical and personnel delays that we arrived one hour and 15 minutes late and missed our connecting train. The Thalys train company was very helpful by apologizing profusely and announcing in three languages that we could get some reimbursement and assistance in the station. The train representative stamped our onward train tickets with "authorization" to change trains to one leaving in a half an hour from a different train station.
We quickly navigated the ridiculously chaotic metro area and took a long journey across town to the Montparnasse Station. With just minutes to spare, we ran through the station, found our train and hopped on. Next hurdle - explaining to the conductor why we had no reservation for the TGV (high speed (read SUPER expensive) train) we were riding on and why he should honor the cheap tickets we had purchased for a slow train. Perhaps he took pity on us or perhaps (more likely) it was just too much hassle for him. Greatly relieved, we settled in for our 5 hour ride towards Toulouse.
The day's series of adrenaline rushes had completely worn us out, but we had to do our best to greet our hostess cheerfully. We got off to a great start with a trip to the supermarket where she purchased everything we desired (we were very modest) and we got a chance to see that even in a fairly small village, the supermarket had a good variety of ethnic food ingredients (at least Mexican, Chinese and Italian) and peanut butter (well...if you consider Skippy peanut butter). The real treat was the mind boggling selection and quantity of wine. It's a good first impression!!
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