France's elaborate train system makes
it easy to travel beyond the glitz of Paris to the many small
and charming cities throughout the country. And its speedy
TGVs make getting there as much fun as being
there.
In France, trains aren't simply transportation. They are time
machines traveling at 100 to 200 years an hour. In the
science-fiction version of time travel, you climb aboard, lean
back, relax … and suddenly you're there. French trains are about
the same.
A French TGV (Train à Grand Vitesse - High Speed Train) will take
you directly from your arrival in Paris' hard-edged, high-tech
21st-century Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG), and quietly deliver
you into the stone-walled, towered, and turreted medieval city of
Carcassonne, vintage 13th century, in barely five hours.
From that discovery, in just a couple of hours more, trains will
arrive in Albi, a remarkable and even more remote town of the same
generation. The world's largest collection of painter
Toulouse-Lautrec's works and memorabilia is found here, at his
birthplace, which alone would make it worth the train ride. An
added bonus is Albi's extraordinary brick fortresslike cathedral,
which has been called "one of the most startlingly original
buildings of the Middle Ages."