Recently I was reminded of my trip to Paris two summers ago with one of our daughters. In many ways, this trip was like something out of an I Love Lucy Show. The one hour train ride from the little northern town of Beauvais into Paris, and then the return trip back was the setting for a series of mishaps, and near disasters.
The train was clean, fast and expensive to take each day. Our motive was to save money by trying to get away with using an old train ticket each day, saving us over 40 euros/day. We got lucky the first time we tried this, and decided to try it again the next day. Much to our dismay, on this particular day there were three men checking tickets once the train got underway. In our favor, the two-level train was built with glass doors separating different areas, which allowed for seeing these "ticket checkers" from afar, and deciding a course of action/escape.
On this particularly fateful day, my daughter and I spent fifty minutes out of the hour train ride into Paris trying to evade these three men. It became a cat and mouse game of sorts, as we both scurried upstairs and down, and even resorted to the bathroom at one point!
Luck eventually ran out, as all three "ticket men" ended up in our section, and it would have been impossible at that point to evade them. I feigned sleep, and let my daughter (whose idea this whole thing was) to deal with the men, and pay the ticket fee. We had been caught five minutes before the train arrived in Paris.
We learned our lesson the hard way, and bought our tickets for the remainder of our trip. I would never try such a thing in the U.S., but something about being in a foreign country, and being on a budget made it seem more reasonable...and even fun at the time. That all ended with paying the full ticket fee, and I would never try such a thing ever again.
The train was clean, fast and expensive to take each day. Our motive was to save money by trying to get away with using an old train ticket each day, saving us over 40 euros/day. We got lucky the first time we tried this, and decided to try it again the next day. Much to our dismay, on this particular day there were three men checking tickets once the train got underway. In our favor, the two-level train was built with glass doors separating different areas, which allowed for seeing these "ticket checkers" from afar, and deciding a course of action/escape.
On this particularly fateful day, my daughter and I spent fifty minutes out of the hour train ride into Paris trying to evade these three men. It became a cat and mouse game of sorts, as we both scurried upstairs and down, and even resorted to the bathroom at one point!
Luck eventually ran out, as all three "ticket men" ended up in our section, and it would have been impossible at that point to evade them. I feigned sleep, and let my daughter (whose idea this whole thing was) to deal with the men, and pay the ticket fee. We had been caught five minutes before the train arrived in Paris.
We learned our lesson the hard way, and bought our tickets for the remainder of our trip. I would never try such a thing in the U.S., but something about being in a foreign country, and being on a budget made it seem more reasonable...and even fun at the time. That all ended with paying the full ticket fee, and I would never try such a thing ever again.
I love "I Love Lucy"! Aww I love this post! It seems something that would come out of a movie or something that would happen to Lucy as you mentioned. It seems like a lot of stress at the time as well as a flavor of adventure. But I'm sure looking back now, there is more humor and adventure involved than stress and fear of getting out of the situation. I wish I could have been there, but I'm happy you had a wonderful time:)
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