OneAndOneIs2

What with one thing and another, I decided to visit my parents for the week. Tricky thing is, they live in France...

So I booked a return trip on the Eurostar trains. And helpfully enough, you can buy the connecting tickets from their site too: You don't have to try and navigate the French website to sort that out.

Yes. VERY helpful. I needed to get from Paris to Nantes, so I booked a train from London to Nantes on the Eurostar website, and gave it no further thought.

Until I was almost in Paris, when I suddenly noticed that my tickets said that I arrived in "Paris Nord" but left from "Paris Mont." for the next leg.

Suddenly, I was faced not with a 50-minute mooch around the train station waiting to set off on the next leg, but with a lot of hassle trying to work out where the hell I needed to go.

So the train pulls into the station, and naturally my carriage is about as far as you can get from the business end. By the time I've been able to reclaim my bags, get off the train, get to the other end, and track down an information desk, I have little under three quarters of an hour left. By the time my broken French has joined forces with the broken English of the man at the info point and he's explained that I need to get on the Metro (the underground) for a 25-minute journey, I've got little over half an hour. And I still need to work out how to buy a ticket and where to go and wait for a train and...

Forget it. The Metro is NOT going to get me there in time. Only alternative: a taxi. So out to the front I go, and explain to the taxi driver that I need to get to this station by 18:00. He appears to take this as a challenge.

...not since I was in Rome have I seen such driving. I was torn between blind panic and sheer admiration. 20 minutes later, with 10 minutes to go, he informed me "Three more minutes"

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he got pulled over.

Not the Police, but some other bunch of uniformed traffic nazis. I have no idea why they pulled him over or who they are or what they do, but they held us up for about five minutes before finally waving us through.

With time now desperately short, my driver didn't give up. No, he found a way of trimming even more time off our arrival: He took to the pavement.

I'm serious. We pulled off the road and drove along the pavement, blasting the horn at the pedestrians who weren't getting out of the way fast enough, and pulled up right outside the doors to the station.

Expecting that to be it, I was surprised and impressed when he grabbed my bag and lead me, at a run, into the station, up all the stairs, and along to the right platform (the furthest one, naturally) and finally, I leapt onto the train with mere seconds to spare.

For the mad taxi drive across Paris, I owed him 70 Euros. For successfully getting me there in time to catch the train, I handed him a c-note and told him to keep the change.

I hadn't expected to see the Eiffel Tower on this journey, and certainly not under those circumstances. But it was nice to see a bit more of the city than the train station.

But even so...