Fontainebleu – Day Trip from Paris
If you want a magnificent day trip from Paris, I highly recommend Fontainebleau Chateau. Some of the first part of the tour was a bit choppy or broken up, but then you start to get into the magnificent rooms of Napoleon, the gorgeous bed that Marie Antoinette never got to use, etc. So worth a trip from Paris. I never tire when looking at the pictures that I took.
I made a suggestion to RS on how to improve directions on how to get to Fontainebleau from Paris. First use Rick's directions, but then read how I would improve on his directions.
Here is my suggestion for an improvement. It is the only area which threw me off in my travels from Paris to Fontainebleau.
Summary: I would emphasize more that a person needs to find Hall 1. Ignore the “A – M” as they are just track numbers. Go up the stairs and the R train is on one of those tracks.
Explanation.
I used the Metro to get to Gare de Lyon. I then found where the Grandes Lignes tracks were.
(Somehow I knew that I needed the “R” train; i.e., the SNCF “R” train. I am not sure if this is in one of his travel guides.)
What confused me is that when I arrived at the Grandes Lignes, Hall 1, as stated in his book,
Hall 1 has big, jumbo letters under Hall 1, “A – M.” I knew I did not want “A to M.” I wanted and needed “R,” as it is the R train that will get a person to Fontainebleau-Avon.
I became a little panicky because I tried looking for the next staircase which would give the alphabet N to Z. In other words, where was the rest of the alphabet.
Finally, in desperation, I went up the stairs of Hall 1, and I noticed I could spot and identify all the tracks of A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M. But where was the “R” train. I ran out of alphabet.
It turns out that “R” is the train, and the A to M are the “ways.” The word I was seeing under the A to M was "voie." When I was up where the platforms were, I kept putting words like “track” and “platform” into Google Translate, and it was not coming back with the French word I had seen, i.e., “voie.”
Just so you know, the mysterious and hard-to-find “R” has a sign...way, way down the long train track, not that big to spot; but it is there.
As I waited in front of the track where the “R” train comes in, the platform person assured me that I was in the right place for the “R” train, which would get me to Fontainebleau-Avon. He told me it only starts to show on the leaderboard about 20 minutes before the train arrives.
I hope the writing above is clear.
