Eurail is frustrating

Never buy a fucking Eurail pass—you have to reserve seats in advance, which is fine, I guess. But the actual process that they propose by which you are expected to reserve seats doesn’t fucking work. The website (which is the only means by which you can reserve the seats in advance) doesn’t show the tickets and arbitrarily prohibits you from booking certain ones that it does show. And you have to book several hours, preferably days, in advance. So although you can, in principle, book in the station, it isn’t generally possible to do it the day of the travel itself. There is, indeed, a second website that allows booking seats on trains, but it will not accept electronic passes: even though the passes are in theory equivalent, the electronic pass lacks a certain code number that appears on the paper pass, and this website explicitly demands this code number, which it explicitly admits only appears on the paper pass. This, despite the fact that you are meant to book the tickets on-line, which is to say, using an electronic device. Honestly the whole thing is an enormous pain in the ass from this perspective: in short, it really isn’t an option, practically, to make long-distance or high-speed trains using the Eurail pass. I’m going to have a fucking aneurysm: is this the “don’t panic” shit? It’s literally an enormous scam. What am I supposed to do? I suppose I’m meant to have planned better in advance—fuck that noise. If the website weren’t literally fucking broken and the second site (why are there two!?) didn’t only accept paper passes (which take months to arrive in the mail), I wouldn’t have this problem. I guess that the alternative is to schlep out to the train station in Lyon today and beg them for a reservation—though I suppose further that the tickets are almost certainly sold out on the twenty TGVs a day that run Paris–Lyon. Honestly, it’s not fucking worth it: I’ll almost certainly have to buy a full-price ticket anyway, which entirely defeats the purpose of the fucking rail pass that I bought so that I didn’t have to buy full-price tickets.

Ok, so in theory you’re meant to reserve the ticket directly through the relevant national rail company, in this case SNCF, the Société national de chemins de fer français. But the SNCF, though they sell Eurail passes, don’t accept them as a discount-giver on their online ticketing system. So you have to pay them full price to book, because the system isn’t programmed to ask you whether you have a Eurail pass, though you can tell it about all kinds of other passes.

So I finally got a ticket into my cart on the Eurail site. Not a direct ticket like I wanted, but one that’ll get me there in a reasonable amount of time from reasonable stations (fuck ouigo: they go from the station at the Lyon airport, which you can’t get to on the metro. I’m not tryna take a fucking taxi to take a cheap train—it’s like when you fly Ryanair to Stanstead and the train into London is longer and more expensive than the flight was). The problem with the indirect ticket is not that I have to change trains, but that I have to change stations: it’s one of these “get from Paris Gare de Lyon to Paris Gare du Nord in 47 minutes” kind of deals—which I hate. In theory it’s an 18 minute metro trip, but who knows how the schedules will line up? It’ll be a maneuver, a dipsy doodle. We’ll see how I fare.

I guess that the conclusion isn’t “don’t get a Eurail pass,” but that it’s important to be aware that it’s a pain in the ass. They advertise it as a “just slide around Europe!”-inator, but it’s a lot of friction in practice. I met these Germans who were on the EU-citizen equivalent, an Interrail pass, and that pass only gives you two travel days in your home country so that people don’t use it as a commuter pass. These boys needed two days to get to Italy from the north of Germany, so they had to buy an extra set of tickets to get home at the end of their trip. And God is the website crummy. But it does save money, at the expense of frustration and time spent wrangling. At a certain point, it’s probably better to hitch-hike. But I’m afraid.