Longing for Paris week: Trapped in the Gare du Nord

We had everything figured out--our train from Calais pulled in to the Gare du Nord train station in Paris at 2:30, we had the metro stops all planned out (Doug named them after people we knew, so that we could remember the names; at one point we had to take the Dave Ballard line), and then we were meeting Erik at 4 p.m. at the Eiffel Tower, which was about six blocks from our hotel.

So we were feeling confident, if not downright cocky, when we got off the train.

We had not figured on getting stuck in the Gare du Nord.

We bumped our suitcases down the endless concrete steps to the Metro and approached one of the many blue ticket machines, pressed "buy tickets," and "pay cash" and got out our Euros expectantly.

The machine took only coins.

We had no coins. Only Euro notes.

So we hit "start over," or whatever the French equivalent is, and then hit "pay with credit card."

It rejected our cards. All of 'em. my Visa card, my debit card, Doug's MasterCard and his credit union card. All firmly rejeté.

(We discovered later that European credit cards have some kind of computer chip in them that American cards don't have. This wasn't a problem anywhere but in the train station. But at the time, this was just one more worry--would our cards work nowhere in France?)

All around us, people were blithely marching up to machines, buying tickets, pushing through the turnstiles, getting onto trains. All we needed was three euros for the tickets. We had three euros! We had a hundred damned euros! But we had no coins. Damn Rick Steves! He hadn't warned us about this!

I was almost in tears. There were no clerks, no change machines, nothing. So we hauled our suitcases back up the concrete steps and went into the main part of the train station. Doug left me with the luggage while he set off to solve the problem.

I stood at our suitcases as he vanished down an escalator, and I watched the clock tick past 3. We were going to be late meeting Erik. How long would he wait? How would we find him later? We didn't know his hotel; he didn't know ours.

Even in my state of dread, the Gare du Nord was a fascinating place. People of all shapes and sizes and colors dashed by, racing for trains, or the exit, or vanishing down the same escalator that Doug had gone down. Pigeons swooped overhead in the soaring open ceiling. A little knot of French soldiers stood near me, with rifles and hats. The clock ticked on. 3:15.

Eventually Doug came back. He was shrugging in a rather Gallic way, and I knew that he had failed. "I found the ticket line," he said. "But it never moved." So he gave up and came back upstairs. I suggested that we try the money-changing booth. Surely that's what they're there for. So we rolled our suitcases across the station to the booth. The man at the window shook his head and pointed at the other window. OK. We rolled over there.

"Sorry," the woman told me. Despite the fact that the word CHANGE was above her head in giant letters, she was not allowed to give change, only to change currency. I was almost weeping by this point. It was almost 3:30. We had to meet erik in a half-hour. And we were trapped in the Gare du Nord.

Perhaps I looked pathetic. Perhaps I looked like I was going to start crying, or commit a crime. Or maybe this just happens all the time. In any event, the woman took pity on me. "If you want to buy a city map for two euros, I can give you change," she said. A map? Brilliant idea! We'll need a map! I shoved a 20 euro note toward her. She gave me a map, and, more importantly, a stack of coins. (I have a feeling she sells a lot of those maps.)

We grabbed our suitcases and dashed back out of the station, down the sidewalk, bump-bump-bumped back down the concrete stairs to the Metro, shoved our coins into a blue machine and were rewarded with Metro tickets. Just like we lived there. Just like we knew what we were doing. Just like Rick Steves was our best friend.

We hopped on the Metro, made the connection to the Dave Ballard line, and emerged, finally, into a sunny spring afternoon. We were on Rue St. Dominique, by a flower-filled park and a stunning view of the absolutely gigantic Eiffel Tower. We found our hotel, on Rue Amelie, checked in, dumped our bags, changed our sweaty clothes, and headed back out to find Erik.

And there he was, near the Eiffel Tower ticket booth nord, wearing sunglasses and a scruffy new beard. Big happy hugs all around. And then we trotted off happily to go see Paris.