Well, that headline is not exactly true, but I do enjoy a good Journey lyric when I can slip one in. In fact, this blog is about our travels by train from Paris to Chamonix. Yes, we are a bit behind in our story telling (and perhaps even a bit out of sequence) but please stay with us.

Travel into Chamonix is not all that simply. Yes, you can drive, but we are traveling as warriors of the rails so we spent time trying to sort out the various train routes, rail stations under construction and transfer points to find the best way there that had an element of fun to it.

Finally, we discovered something that seemed like a fun little adventure – an overnight sleeper train that left at 11 pm and arrived in St. Gervais at around 8:45 am the next day. From St. Gervais, we were to take a local train that brought us into Chamonix a little before 10 am.  

So, we booked two bunks in a berth that slept six for a value price of forty euros per person, quite a bargain compared to our Paris hotel rate that we had just paid up.

We piled into our bottom bunks, settled our backpacks at the foot of our beds and within minutes the berth door was closed, the blinds we pulled and it was “lights out”, clearly sleeper car etiquette is no joke.  

We slept well through the night, the train winding along its route and occasionally I heard the wheels screeching against the tracks.  It stopped about three times before St. Gervais – first in Annecy where we lost two bunk-mates and then again in two unremarkable towns along the countryside.

While we later learned from friends – who didn’t even know this train route existed – that there is a train that goes via Geneva, with a bus transfer into Chamonix that takes about 3 hrs (versus the 11 hours we treked) . They were a bit bemused by our preferred travel path, but we agreed that half the fun was the adventure of riding the rails and a restless sleep on the tiny little bunks. Well worth it and certainly an adventure we would do again.