Paris to Barcelona in a Sleeper Train

As an adult, and working in the High-Tech space, I had the opportunity to travel Paris on a pretty frequent basis.

On one of the trips, I had enough frequent flier miles to be able to take my wife and daughter (at the time, 12 years old) on one of my trips with me.

While I was meeting with sales reps and hosting training sessions, my wife and daughter had the chance to tour a bit of the city and see some of the sites.  When I was done, we grabbed a taxi and had the driver take us to Chessy, a town about 40 minutes from Paris where Euro Disney is located.

We had a great time there, although, my daughter, now used to Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California, found the park to be a bit cramped and I found it pretty dirty, in comparison. But we had a good time there riding similar rides that the U.S. and French based parks had in common and trying some different foods at the walk-up carts.  Unfortunately, the clouds broke and the rain came down, drenching us to the bone. 

After drying off some, we took a taxi to the downtown Paris train station for our overnight trip to Barcelona, where family would be meeting us.

I had pre-purchased all the seats in a 1st class 4-berth couchettes, otherwise, I was told that, if the train was full, they could place a stranger in with us – which I did not like.

It was very comfortable and my daughter loved the fact that she could switch between the two top beds.

We ordered a little dinner and a bottle of wine and settled in for the 6 and half hour ride.  The rocking of the train was actually soothing and put us all to sleep within minutes.  The fact that we were exhausted from a day at Euro Disney greatly contributed to our rapid sleep!

We arrived in Barcelona and my uncle, aunt and cousins were there to welcome us.  We took advantage of being there and toured the beautiful Gothic District (more of that in a later blog) and took in all the sites that that area has to offer, not the least of which was the beautiful cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulàlia, a truly magnificent structure filled with art and stained-glass windows.

This was my daughter’s first introduction to Spain and her Spanish family.  We all had a great time and enjoyed paella and sangrias until we couldn’t put another bit in our mouths!