Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon- how fast?

That's only a ten minute ride with no changes. You'll use that much time again getting to and from the correct platforms. Add a couple of minutes to buy tickets. Figure a half hour if you have brain freeze. Nord generally has taxis, but they can disappear with arriving trains. On Sunday, it's probably only a fifteen minute drive. You'll probably have the about the same ten total minutes of walking. You'll need a couple of minutes to pay the guy. It's a coin toss, but I'd go with the metro since it's predictable - - there were too many 'probably's in the taxi discussion.

Yeah...this scenario is making my chest feel tight... First of all, go potty on the train ;-) Then, the taxi line for people returning to Paris on a Sunday afternoon could be longish. I saw 2 possible chances at RER D on a Sunday in June: Dp 16:07 Ar 16:25, or Dp 16:18 Ar 16:33. Ick; kinda tight, even if you did this trip every week. I don't know how many of you there are, your level of mobility, nor your ability to pack very lightly. And you know about underground stations, and the staircases... Will your train arrive on time? Will you run into a large (tour/school) group of: not-very-mobile seniors, wheelchair users, tiny tots, luggage carts, etc. - all things you can't just bowl over in your rush to get to the RER tracks? Been there, seen them, couldn't bowl them over in our hurry LOL. I'd try hard to find another solution, but that's me. I don't know if your Gare de Lyon trip is a frequent train or not...

There are two of us, both quite fit, but we'll be lugging wheeled suitcases we won't enjoy carrying instead of pulling. I haven't been to Paris since 1973 (awful, isn't it) so I don't know these stations at all. We're both reasonably able to get by in French. We already have tickets, but I am thinking I will take the TGV that goes 1/2 hour later to avoid the possibility that we'll hit unpredictable delays.

Smart move.

That makes a lot more sense. G-d-Lyon is a big place with two different areas for tracks, the blue and the yellow. If you have to get from one to the other its a long 5 to 10 minute walk, and you need to be at the right car of the train and the trains are long. Save a bit of stress. Good move.

Back story: RailEurope produces this too tight connection when you ask them for schedules from Muenster to Avignon. It does not give you the option with the 1/2 hour extra to get from one station to the other. When I called them and said that I felt they were offering a defective route, their attitude was "tough luck": you should have studied what we offered carefully enough to detect its flaws. Its not our fault if you expect us to offer reasonable routes. (Please pardon the sarcasm. I'm mildly underwhelmed here.) Mind you, they DO warn you that in the Cologne train station you only have 31 minutes to get from one track to another, but they DON'T warn you that in Paris you only have 47 minutes to get from one station to another! When I asked why their computer doesn't offer the option of the more relaxed connection, the agent said I was supposed to enter each leg of the journey separately to get better information about the choices available to me. Well, yeah, sure, now that I know how defective their algorithms are, I'll do that if I ever have to buy anything through them again. More likely, I'll look for a better source.

Ahhh... There's your problem: Rail Europe. You should be looking at http://www.tgv-europe.com/en/ for French trains, http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/index.shtml for German trains AND the best all-around train route planner for all countries (can only purchase tickets for trains that travel in Germany from them), etc. What countries are you traveling in? On tgv-europe.com, on the 'info input box' you're asked "Ticket Collection Country" - choose "Great Britain" to keep from being kicked to Rail Europe, then on the next page choose the second button ("...tgv-europe.com...Euros...") and NOT the first button ("...raileurope.co.uk..."). Edit: On bahn.com you can chose to "Adjust Transfer Time" on their timetables; I got you a 1h17m to transfer in Paris - much better. Play around with the schedules until it works. Or, choose Muenster>Paris, then Paris>Avignon...

Thanks for the tips on preventing tgv-europe from passing me off to RailEurope. I like bahn.de a lot, and have mainly used that in the past. I hadn't needed to link to the French system before. When I asked bahn.de for Munster -> Avignon, I got 'Total fare cannot be calculated', so thought I should use a system that did know the fare. My mistake! I still don't know how bahn.de will handle billing since the computer cannot compute the fare. BTW, bahn.de gave me both connections in Paris, told me that a 15 min walk was involved at each station and the RER that I needed to do it. Damn, they are good! (But it seems maybe they think I walk slowly because of my age? :-)

There's only one station in Paris that takes more ten minutes to get from extreme to extreme and you're not using it. (Maybe two, but you're not going there either.) For your two, five minutes if you know where you're going from front door to most distant platform - - ten if you have to stop to read signs more than once or have to recover from a slight wrong turn.