Three Trains, Two Kids, and One Husband I Almost Lost Forever

Or: Everything I Know About French Rail, Learned the Hard Way

We take the train a lot here. France makes it easy to: the TGV will fling you across the country at three hundred kilometers an hour while you eat a sandwich, and the regional lines connect even the small villages, and the whole thing is, by American standards, quite civilized.

I like the train, and I want to clarify that because what follows is three stories in which the train and I were not on speaking terms. All three are true. I have recovered from exactly none of them.

The Time the Train Left With My Husband On It

We were coming back from Strasbourg, where we’d been visiting my sister and her husband. We had a system. We always have a system, seasoned travelers we be. I would take the kids and the backpacks and duffel bags and get off at one door. Sean would go to where the big suitcases were stored and get off by that door. We had rehearsed this. We were professionals.

The train pulled into our stop. I got off with the kids. We stood on the platform. We waited.

It was a crowded day, where what seemed like the entire population of eastern France apparently also needed to disembark at exactly our station, and the crowd coming off Sean’s door was thick and slow, a river of people and luggage inching toward the platform. I watched the door. I watched the river of people. I watched the river keep flowing, and flowing, and then I watched the door close.

I would like to tell you I handled this with dignity. I did not. I left my children and our bags on the platform and I ran. I ran to the train and I started banging on the door with both hands as it began, slowly, to move. I was yelling. I’d like to say I was calling out, but I was yelling (screaming?), the way you yell in a film right before the credits, when the lover is being carried away on the train and the music swells. There was a SNCF worker on the platform and I was yelling at him too, that my husband was on the train, my husband was still on the train, in the tone of a woman reporting a kidnapping.

By now my kids had registered the situation. The train was leaving with their father visible inside it, and they were sobbing. A kind woman materialized to comfort them, which I only noticed later, because at the time I was fully occupied delivering my grievances to the SNCF worker, who looked at me with enormous gentleness and said, “Je suis désolé. The train has to leave on time.”

The train has to leave on time. In France, that is a point of pride, and the schedule does not bend for one American family. The train left on time. My husband was on it.

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I called Sean. He was somewhere past the platform, and he explained between breaths that he had really tried, he had pushed toward the door yelling that his family was outside, that he had to get off, but everyone had their own bags and their own stops and their own agendas, and you cannot exactly leave two large suitcases on a departing train to go chase your wife. He had not made it. The doors had won.

So we made a new plan. I took a breath, redistributed the bags across both shoulders, and decided that for the next few hours I was going to be the kind of person who has this handled. The train's final stop was about an hour up the line. Sean would ride to the end, then ride the whole thing back, and I would collect him that night from the bus station near our village. Fine. Solvable. Except now I had every soft bag we owned, because Sean had only the rolling suitcases, which meant I layered myself in backpacks and duffels like a pack animal, like a donkey at the start of a long journey, and I herded two tear-streaked children into the station.

They were hungry. They had to pee. And I learned something I had managed to avoid learning for years, which is that I almost never travel alone with both kids, and there is a reason for that, and the reason is logistics. There is no older sibling to “just watch them for a second” while you buy a snack. There is just you, and two small people, and a quantity of luggage that requires its own postal code, and a daughter who needs the bathroom on the far side of the station.

I could not get all of us and all of the bags into a single station bathroom. It was physically impossible. So I did the thing every parenting instinct I own screams against: I scanned the little waiting area for the most trustworthy human available, identified an older woman calmly reading a newspaper, and asked her if she could watch my son for two minutes while I took my daughter to the toilet. She said bien sûr, of course, with the warmth of someone who has watched many children for many strangers. I speed-walked my daughter across the station with my heart going like a hummingbird, and it was fine. It was completely fine. He was exactly where I left him, with the nice newspaper woman, unbothered.

Then we went to the parking garage, and I discovered that Sean had the long-term parking ticket in his pocket. On the train. Heading the wrong direction.

So I did what any reasonable woman with two traumatized children and seven bags would do, which is squat near the garage exit like a raccoon until some innocent person walked out, and then lunge for the closing gate to slip us inside. I want you to picture this - four backpacks (two on my back, two on my front), three duffels looped around my neck and shoulders, two children with tear-streaked faces, one mother performing a heist on a parking structure. We found the car, which felt like a small miracle. We got to the exit, pressed the help intercom, explained the situation to a disembodied French voice, and were eventually released into the night.

I drove the kids the hour home. I fed them. And later that night, we drove out together and picked up their father from the bus station, returned to us by the same rail system that had taken him, only slower.

Everyone was safe. Everyone was fed. My children now know that their mother will, if pressed, break into a parking garage.

The Time I Walked the Entire Length of a Train. Twice.

You’d think I’d have learned to respect the train after that. I had not learned. I had merely become arrogant.

We were heading to Paris to catch a flight to California for a family visit, which meant we were traveling with the luggage of people who will be gone three weeks. Sean had already studied the platform and identified the exact spot where our specific train car would stop. He was confident. I was confident in his confidence.

I should explain something about French train cars, which is that they are labeled the way state secrets are labeled. The car number lives on a small digital screen that you can only read if you are standing directly in front of it at an angle known to physicists, and even then it’s faded, and the seat numbers inside are the same, hidden in tiny print in inconvenient places. Most trains have eight cars, with car 1 at one end and car 8 at the other, but which end is which depends entirely on the direction the train pulled into the station, so you have to check every single time, and the checking is exactly as easy as I have just described.

But again, Sean was confident. Our seats were in car 8, and we were standing where car 8 would open. The train arrived. The doors opened. We got on.

Sean went off immediately to find a luggage rack big enough for our suitcases. I took, as always, the backpacks and the duffels and the children, and we went to find our seats. There was a woman in one of our seats. This happens constantly. I smiled, showed her my ticket, explained politely that she was in my seat.

She looked at the ticket and said, kindly, “No. This isn’t your seat. You’re supposed to be in car 8. This is car 2.”

My heart sank to somewhere around my shoes. I called Sean and told him to start moving toward the opposite end of the train with the giant suitcases. And then I began the long march. The kids and I set off through every car, the entire length of the train, in the heat, in the crowd, while people were still settling in and stowing their bags, which meant that every car we entered required a small crowd of strangers to sigh and move their things out of the aisle so that this sweating American woman and her two grumpy children could pass. Between every car is an automatic connecting door that opens for roughly two seconds before closing, so the choreography was: hold the door open with one outstretched arm, send both kids through, let it close, reopen it, send myself through. Repeat eight times. It took almost twenty minutes.

We reached the very last car, the absolute opposite end. I found our seats. There were people in all four of them.

I pulled out my ticket again. I showed it to a woman. And she said, with great pity, “Yes, but you’re supposed to be in car 8. This is car 2.”

Wait. What?

I told her, no, this could not be car 2, car 2 was at the other end, I had personally just walked the entire length of France to get here. She looked at me in a way you look at someone who has had a small break with reality and told me, gently, that I had it backwards. Untrusting now, betrayed by the universe, I asked three other people around us. All three said the same thing. We were standing in car 2. Car 8 was at the far end. The end I had just come from.

I wanted to sob. If I had been alone I would have given myself permission. Instead I told the children we were going on another adventure, in the voice of a woman who has fully left her body, and I called Sean, who was on his own equally cursed journey somewhere in the middle of the train with the suitcases, by this point so far away he may as well have been in a different country.

We turned around and walked all the way back. And do you know who we passed on the return trip? The first woman. The one who had been sitting in my actual seat. The one who told me the exact wrong information. She saw me coming and called out, “Oh, désolée! I was wrong!”

I could not look at her. I could not.

The strangers in the cars, who had been mildly annoyed to move their bags for us the first time, were now deeply annoyed and also visibly confused, watching the same family promenade past in the opposite direction. What is happening with these people? Is this a traveling rail family? Do they simply enjoy this? Is the journey itself the destination for them?

But what I cannot stay mad about is the fact that it is confusing, and there really was a giant number “2” displayed inside our actual car 8, except it didn’t refer to the car at all. It was a number for something else, maybe the stop, maybe a code known only to SNCF and God. I had no one to blame but my own credulity. She was wrong and confident, and I’d taken her confidence as fact and walked a marathon on it.

What I learned, I learned permanently: trust, yes. Be open, yes. But verify. I took one stranger’s certainty and treated it as gospel, and it cost me forty minutes and most of my will to live. I have not made that mistake since.

The Time I Got Shushed in First Class

We bought first-class tickets once. The price difference for this particular route was about twenty euros total, and we decided to treat ourselves.

I should manage expectations: first class on these trains is not a different planet. It’s usually upstairs, with a slightly nicer view and slightly bigger seats. The ride was going to be almost four hours, so we settled in for the long haul and deployed the full arsenal to occupy the kids: coloring books, activity books, stickers, drawing pads, pens, snacks, drinks. The children were being, by any honest measure, lovely. They colored. They talked quietly to each other. My daughter hummed her favorite song under her breath while she drew.

Then I heard a shush.

I heard it once and didn’t place it. I heard it twice. By the third time I started turning around, because it had begun to dawn on me that the shushing was directed at us, which made no sense, because we were not loud people, we were a coloring family with a quietly humming child. I looked behind me. A young woman with a book, radiating irritation.

“Are you shushing my kids?” I said, irritated right back.

“I’m trying to read,” she said.

“They’re children,” I said.

I mean, come on. Are two small children supposed to maintain silence for a four-hour train ride? That is not a reasonable expectation in any country, and anyone who has ever had a child, French or American, knows it. After our little exchange the shushing stopped, but it was replaced by an upgrade: enormous, theatrical, full-bodied sighs every single time one of my children made a sound, including speaking.

We’ve since pieced together what happened. There’s an unspoken expectation in first class that it stay quiet, almost library-quiet, which we just did not know, because the first couple of times we’d ridden up there, there had been other families around us making exactly the same amount of human noise, and it had been completely fine. The difference this time was that there were no other families in our car. We were the only source of sound on the entire upper deck of this car, which made us the protagonists of one woman’s ruined afternoon. (Quiet in public is a genuine French value, and it's a hill I've already chosen not to die on elsewhere.)

So we made a decision, and it has held. We ride second class now. We have accepted that we are second-class people, and second class comes with a freedom first class does not: the freedom to speak, and hum, and exist, at the volume of a normal family, with no one nearby paying twenty extra euros for the right to be furious about it.

What I’d Actually Tell You Before You Get on a French Train

If you take nothing else from my suffering, take these. They are the field guide I wish someone had handed me before any of the above.

Split your luggage with the kids in mind, not the bags. Our old system put one parent with the rolling suitcases and the other with the kids and all the soft bags. It works right up until something goes sideways and the parent with the kids is also wearing four backpacks and three duffels. Whoever has the children should carry the least, because the children are the load. Everything else can be dropped, dragged, or abandoned. The children cannot.

Check which end car 1 is on. Every single time. The car you board depends on the direction the train entered the station, and the numbering reverses accordingly. The little digital screens are nearly impossible to read, so confirm before you commit, and do not start walking the length of the train on a stranger’s confident say-so. Ask three people first. I learned that one the long way.

Build in real platform buffer, and have a “if we get separated” plan. Trains stop briefly and leave exactly on time, on purpose, as a point of national pride. If your family is splitting between doors, agree in advance on what happens if someone doesn’t make it off: who goes where, who has the car key, who has the parking ticket. Especially the parking ticket. And keep your phones charged, because when it falls apart, and occasionally it will, the only thing that saves you is reaching the person on the wrong end of the train immediately.

If you’re traveling with young kids, skip first class. Pocket the twenty euros. First class carries a ‘quiet’ expectation that your humming, coloring, perfectly normal children will violate the moment your car happens to be empty of other families. Second class is louder, cheaper, and far more forgiving of the fact that you brought human children onto a train.

Pack the entertainment arsenal regardless. Coloring books, stickers, snacks, drawing pads. It may not stop a stranger from sighing at you, but it will keep your kids happy for hours, and a happy kid is the difference between a long ride and a long ride you’ll be writing about for years.

The train is still my favorite way to travel in France. I just check the car number four times now, and I never let Sean carry the parking ticket.

À bientôt,
Kamille

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