John Linton
We had a late start to the day as all we were going to do was to travel to Burgundy for three days of vineyard visits and visiting more highly recommended restaurants around Beaune. So, for the first time in our lives together we braved the French railway system to get us from Gare de Lyon to the very small town of Beaune. We cheated a bit by getting to the station by car rather than using the Metro but because we were carrying our own luggage we regarded doing that via underground rail a bit too much. So we arrived at Gare de Lyon and found out where our train left from (not as easy as it sounds because our ticket said Dijon but the platform board index said Lausanne and assumed the various travelers would know what the intermediate stops were).
However, veteran travelers that we are, we found out what train went via Dijon (using the train number printed on the ticket and comparing it to the platform indicator) and then, even more cleverly, we discovered the the yellow square next to the train number meant that the platform was in the 'old' part of the station some few hundred meters away from where we were working this out. Eventually we found the platform and were lucky enough, once again, to get there earlier enough to obtain a share of the limited baggage stowage and found our seats. The French TVG high speed train services appears to use the same rolling stock as the Euro Star - except it's far newer and cleaner and the seats actually recline a little.
The trip from Paris to Dijon was uneventful and the scenery was flat and topologically unremarkable until we reach Dijon which is perched on a hill and is an attractive town (from the little we saw). We had almost an hour to wait for the local train connection to Beaune which passed quite quickly (except this time the platform display did not disply Beaune they also did not display any train number - we eventually worked it out) and we hauled our luggage up two flights of quite steep stairs and boarded the local train. If only NSW trains were this fast, clean, well appointed and comfortable....which they aren't by a very long way. It was a nineteen minute trip to Beaune with the 'scenery' much more interesting consisting almost entirely of rows of vines being picked by hundreds and hundreds of people.
Both trains departed and arrived to the second stated on the tickets. Our 'tour guide' met us at Beaune station (quite tiny with only one entrance/exit) and drove us to our hotel some 10 or so kilometers outside the little town. It is a lovely place to stay with big gardens and woods with a small river flowing through the grounds. A more than adequate base to allow us to visit some of the more famous vineyards and shippers of great Burgundies for the next three days. The mobile sim Catherine bought for us when we met her when we first arrived is performing well (300 minute/300 SMS/1 gB data for thirty pounds is doing well but, for the first time, we could get no usable signal in our hotel room. Fortunately it worked in the hotel's bar.
Dinner in the restaurant's one Michelin star restaurant was far more 'conventional' than the meals we had in Paris but none the less pleasant enough except for the table position which detracted greatly from the overall pleasure of the dining experience. I ordered a wine I had previously drunk in one of Sydney's better restaurants quite recently. It was slightly lower priced but it tasted significantly better - so much so they could have been quite different wines. One reason for coming to Burgundy it to test a theory I have developed (totally unscientifically) that French wines suffer from being shipped to Australia so badly they are often very disappointing in taste and no where near justify the high prices charged for them in Sydney. We will have to eat somewhere else for the remainder of our stay.
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