Christmas mini-adventure day one: Angoulême-Strasbourg

I had some Eurostar vouchers to use, so I’m trying to get myself into the Christmas spirit.

Recently, a friend was telling me about how she always books through-journeys to England via the SNCF web site with potential for a missed conncetion that’s also the last train; if there’s a delay or a cancellation, she gets put up in a hotel for a night while waiting for the SNCF to find the next train. I think this is a stroke of genius and will try it in the future.

Following various cancellations from last year’s Christmas joyfest, I had £150 of Eurostar vouchers to use before the end of the year (props to Eurostar for being sensible) so decided I’d have a leisurely trip back to the UK using my new carte weekend and have a little Christmas mini-adventure at the same time. This seemed a good idea at the time I booked it — before the world started exploding again — but you make do with what you have.

At the beginning and the end of 2019’s Interrail extravaganza, I identified Strasbourg and Lille as places that merited a visit, but never got to travel to either because of the first, second, third and fourth waves of plague and pestilence. I booked these tickets back in October, the idea being that I’d have a nice stress-free holidayette before getting on a Eurostar to London a few days later. At the moment, my plans have not changed, but it is only Saturday.

Strasbourg’s Christmas Market is the oldest (and by all accounts best) in France, dating back to 1570, so this seemed a good place to start. Christmas is not my favourite time of year, but give me a glass or two of vin chaud and I’m happy to spend a day or two oohing and aahing at sparkly tat.

I was up nice and early to get the 9h38 direct TGV from Angoulême to Strasbourg. I’d booked it from Bordeaux because despite being further from my destination than Angoulême, the ticket was 20€ cheaper, as it was non-refundable and non-changeable, so there was little (absolutely no) room for error. I booked seat 61 on the upper deck of my carriage, which gave me my own little window and nobody opposite or next to me. Seat 121 would’ve had me facing the direction of travel.

It’s difficult to know whether to book in the direction of travel or not. In an emergency stop situation, it’s a toss-up between being thrown into the laps of people opposite or being crushed by people landing on you. The solution is the lonely traveller’s place isolée with an airline-style seat, which mitigates the situation slightly but still leaves the possibility of a lap full of lunch or a severe headache.

This is, however, somewhat irrelevant as I slept for a lot of this journey so would’ve snoozed through any catastrophe anyway. I dozed through most of the first couple of five hours until I heard people inviting me to judge their lunches. Mine was slightly less of a feast than last time, but I did still manage to make my own egg mayonnaise at my seat. There were carrot sticks, more hummous, brie and lamb’s lettuce sandwiches and a little bottle of pink. Some apples. Bisuits. Half a bar of chocolate. Clementines.

It’s a long journey from Angoulême to Strasbourg at five hours and seventeen minutes so there’s plenty of time to sit back and watch the world go by between power naps. Years ago I did a Christmas run in the week before Christmas and watched the landscape get more and more wintry the further north we travelled, but this time I managed only to sit and watch the rain start somewhere after Lorraine TGV.

We arrived at 14h41 and I as I stepped off the train I took a moment to congratulate myself on choosing a coat with a hood. I spent some time enjoying the glass atrium which protect the 19th century façade and its passengers from bad weather, then ventured downstairs to buy a tram ticket.

A three-day unlimited travel pass (tram, bus) costs 9,30€, not that it’s going to be all that much good given that the Compagnie des Transports Strasbourgoise has announced an unlimited strike from today. I shouldn’t be surprised by this; Christmas in France can’t really start without some sort of public transport disruption from people with much better benefits packages than the rest of us — and nothing more demonstrates how much you value passengers than reducing the service from five trams an hour to two and stuffing the same number of them into a no-moving steamy environment in the middle of a world-wide respiratory disease pandemic.

It’s almost as if they’re daring us to automate them.

Nonetheless, I braved the tram D to my Airbnb and then back again to the Grande Île where I walked around without much purpose, gawping at sparkly tat everywhere. I resisted buying anything – although I’ll have to tomorrow – but did manage to stumble upon a vegan kebab shop (many noms) and drink some yummy vin chaud.

I kept the plastic goblet from my vin chaud to keep so that I have a small receptacle to take with me on future rail journeys. I forgot to pack one while faffing last night; drinking wine from the bottle on the train is not a good look, even in first.

With the strike, trams aren’t running as late as usual so I took what turned out to be the last tram D from Etoile Bourse to Citadelle, chatted with my Airbnb host and then went to bed.