Paris Travel Interruption: you’ll never guess who.

An unexploded WW2 bomb was found yesterday just outside of the Paris Gare Du Nord station. Ryan C. and I were planning to travel from Cologne into this station and had plans to spend the weekend in Paris. Obviously finding an 80 year old bomb just outside the station would result in total shutdowns of all trains coming in and going out of the station. Who whoulda thought!  We were contacted by the rail service Eurostar, which was the company we booked the train with, at 11:15 a.m. Our train was scheduled to leave at around 4, meaning we had just a few hours to come up with a plan to get from Brussels (the city of our connecting train) to Paris, roughly two and half hours by car.

This ensued an immense amount of google searches looking for other trains, busses, flights, car sharing apps, and even the possibility of renting a car. The station in Paris that was shut down is seemingly the only station in Paris that receives trains from long distances so that was out of the question. The busses were all booked up immediately after the station was shut down because we were in fact not the only people that were stuck without a train! The flights were ridiculously expensive because not only was it the last days of fashion week in Paris, but the airlines jacked up all the prices when the station closed because they suddenly had a much higher percent of all the supply of transport so they could charge a crazy amount. The car sharing app didn’t do much for us as it really didn’t want to approve our American phone numbers. Then renting a car wasn’t an option either because in Belgium you need to be 21, however, in Germany you can rent a car at 19, but we would’ve been charged incredible fees for taking the car so long in one way. So after exhausting seemingly every other possible outcome, we swallowed our pride and took the train back from our McDonalds workplace in Cologne, to Bonn.

While Europe is incredibly accessible, having many different effective modes of transport, there are always circumstances that get in your way. Whether these circumstances are train strikes, political stances, or wars (even from 80 years ago), you still had the opportunity in the first place to make that trip. In the US, while it is harder to travel, if you plan a trip it is very rare that it will fall through. The main travel in the states is definitely cars. Taking a car, while often slow, is reliable in the fact that roads, and bridges will likely not shut down. Here it is much more likely a train will break down, a station will shut down, or even smaller things like trains just being late that cause you to miss a connection. I am a huge proponent of public transit and especially trains, but I am certainly experiencing first hand what can go wrong.

Much love,

Ryan D.

References

Kapoor, M. (2025, March 7). Paris: WWII bomb discovery disrupts trains. dw.com. https://www.dw.com/en/paris-wwii-bomb-discovery-disrupts-trains/a-71853070