France trip report part 2: Overall observations about the logistics of the trip

Public Transportation:
We used the local trains, buses, trams 1 & 2 while in the French Riviera. There is always a little learning curve as far as getting tickets from the machines but I became more confident about it as time went on. There is an English option that you should look for first on the screen before you start choosing anything else. We did buy tickets at manned ticket windows at times as well. When we went to Monaco, I had to buy our one way tickets from a machine in the station since we had not decided beforehand what means of transportation we wanted to use to go back. When we tried to validate our tickets it didn't work. I noticed that the bar code square was smudged on both tickets as if the ink was running out in the machine. We finally just gave up & took our unvalidated tickets and receipt and got on the train. We had not been approached by anyone yet to see any tickets we had purchased but we lucked out. In the French Riviera, we used the train that was a 10 minute walk from our hotel in Villefranche everyday, including to get to the Nice Ville station the day we took the TVG to Avignon. We used a bus once to get from Nice to Cap Ferrat to go to the Villa Ephrussi de Rothchild. The bus was hot & crowded but we got there!
Paris: We got the Navigo Decouverte card when we arrived in Paris on a Thursday & it was good through Sunday. The cost was 27 Euros. If you are in the Gare de Lyon train station, you need to go all the way downstairs into the metro area to get the pass. I had printed a picture of the description of the Navigo Decouverte card & had reduced size pictures of us (as posters advised) before we left on the trip. So we walked up to a window, said “Bonjour”, asked to purchase it & handed the ticket agent all of our stuff. She put everything together for us & we were all set for the rest of the time until Monday when we bought a one way ticket to CDG. With the Navigo card, there is a scanner on top of the area where you go through the entrance & you just hold the strip on your card over the circle & watch for green arrows to light up next to it & go through. My husband was trying to slide his card over the scan area and it didn’t work one time. I think he tried it a couple more times the wrong way & an agent said he would have to wait ten minutes since he tried too many times. But they did something that made it work for him then anyway. So he learned his lesson! The morning we went to Versailles, the route that the Metro app told us to go was wrong; there was work being done on the RER train from the station we went to for transferring from Line 14 to RER C train. So we wasted at least 30 minutes trying to figure out where to go to get an RER C. Finally, one of the agent windows opened & someone told us what was going on & how to get to Versailles from the station we were at. But it caused us to be later getting to Versailles and we missed our guided tour as a result.
Now for the two incidents involving people not having a train ticket for whatever reason: The first was on the RER train to Versailles. When we arrived at the station that was the stop before the Versailles station, a door opened in the train & about a dozen train patrol people walked out & asked everyone on the train to show them their tickets. We saw at least one person shelling out some Euros on the spot because she didn’t have a train ticket. The other incident was when we exited the train at TGV 2 at CDG.We went up an escalator following the signs to the terminal & there were agents waiting at the top to see every person’s train ticket before they would let them go into the terminal. There was a young man a girl who didn’t have a ticket and I don’t know what ended up happening to them but they were not letting them into the terminal. Rick’s books say to hold on to your train ticket until you have completely exited the station or area in case you get asked to present!