I was up at 08:20 after yet another night with very little sleep. I was going to be thankful for decent pillows after this trip. For our final time, we headed to Clef Dorée for breakfast. This time I had a pain au chocolat, with my usual Earl Grey tea. Amusingly the person serving us didn’t need to show me the box of tea he just waved a packet of Earl Grey at me to double check I was having ‘the usual’.

We then headed back to finish packing, and left Roswitha to check out as we headed to the T4 tram stop to head back to Gare Part-Dieu Villette. Carmen had got leftover pizza from Thursday night for her lunch today, but I needed to buy something. We went in Relay, where I bought a ham and cheese baguette, a miniature pack of Pringles, and a bottle of Coca-cola. Hopefully it would be enough to last me until getting home some time after what would be the equivalent of 20:26 Lyon time.

When we left the store, we got a little confused about the board outside when Carmen pointed out our train wasn’t listed. I suggested we go to the ticket office to find out what’s going on, but then I spotted she’d looked at the arrivals board instead of departures by accident. It’s very easily done though, and I was sure I’d done the same in Lille.

This was just in time for the platform to be announced, so we headed there to find that it’s handily partitioned off into letters that correspond to the coach number you’re on. It’s a very handy way of making sure people are ready to get on the right coach quickly. Carmen also spotted a couple of British dancers from the weekend which she spoke to whilst waiting for the train to arrive. They told us that changing trains in Paris is a nightmare, and many people will travel through Brussels on the Eurostar instead to avoid it. Great.

For this journey we were upstairs on a double decker train, so we had a good view of the countryside for the two hours it took to reach Paris Gare de Lyon. There were times it rained, but at the speed we were travelling at the windows were clearing quite quickly. Even though we knew the stress of Paris was ahead of us, we could relax for now and have lunch.

As the train approached Paris, we joined the queue of people waiting to go downstairs. We wanted to be as quick as possible as it was going to be a tight connection. We’d got 91 minutes until our Eurostar train to London, but only 61 minutes before the check-in would close. The entire journey is booked through Eurostar, but they don’t really build in a very good buffer of time for travelling from Paris Gare de Lyon to Paris Gare du Nord. If you miss your connection, they do put you on the next available train, but with an onward train from London to Leicester booked I really couldn't miss this one.

We rushed to where the Metro D line is, and queued for tickets, but when we reached the front the machines had broken so had to join another queue for different machines. This meant we’d missed the 13:13 train, so had to make sure we got the 13:28 train, otherwise it’d be another thirty minutes until the next and that would get us there just after the check-in closes.

The ticket machine is fairly simple to use once we’d selected English. We chose a metro ticket, and then had to select the number of tickets we wanted. The way this works though is that you pay €2.00 for the card, and then €2.50 for the journey. It’s considerably more expensive than getting a reusable travel card in Lyon, and doesn’t seem to give you the option of not getting one like you would for the London Underground. I did wonder if we could have used a contactless bankcard to tap in though. We didn’t really have time to find out.

We rushed to the platform for the metro, and boarded the train in the direction of Orry-la-Ville-Coye. Surprisingly, even this metro train was a double decker which is something I’ve not seen for other underground trains. It’s two stops and only takes a few minutes to reach Gare du Nord, and from there we had to rush across the train station, and up several flights of stairs to Hall 2 - the place that all trains to the UK depart from. The reason for this is since Brexit our trains have to be segregated from the rest due to border controls and security.

We reached the ticket barrier with less than ten minutes to spare. I noticed that the first set of e-gates, for leaving France, have an age restriction of 18+ on them. After that we have to get our passport stamped for leaving, and then reach the e-gates for ‘entering’ the UK. These ones though say 12+ on them, so I’m not sure why there’s the age difference. At security, unlike at St. Pancras, I had to remove my laptops, phone, camera, and Nintendo Switch from my bags which took some time as I hadn’t expected it.

By the time I’d gotten everything repacked on the other side of security, our platform had been announced. We headed to the train, and around this time I noticed that our tickets said 14:42 on them, and not 14:31 - at some point the train had been rescheduled. I wasn’t sure if it was due to the changed service on the Paris metro for the school holidays, or if they just knew it would be running late. Whatever the reason, we departed on time. I did realise it also meant we’d actually had ten minutes more to spare than I’d thought, but it wouldn’t have made a difference if we’d missed that metro train.

The journey from Paris to London takes around 2h23 so is a much quicker journey than via Lille, even if it is a little more stressful with the connections. Once again we’d got seats without an actual window, but the time still passed by quite quickly. The arrival in London was fairly straight-forward, with a slow moving queue to get from the platform to the exit. As we’d already gone through Border Control in France, there was nothing to do this side, other than walk through customs, which wasn’t in use.

Carmen then waited with me at St. Pancras until it was time for me to queue for my train to Leicester. Usually the train to Leicester will take between sixty to ninety minutes, but due to some planned works it meant not only would they not stop at Market Harborough as normal, but they would be taking a diversion from Corby that would go through Melton Mowbray before approaching Leicester from the north. This diversion adds about an hour onto the journey unfortunately.

From door to door it was a lot of time spent on trains, but it had been worth it for a short adventure in France.