Last year my wife of 17 years and I celebrated our anniversary by going out for dinner with the kids at Hard Rock Cafe in Piccadilly Circus. This isn’t our usual choice for a romantic anniversary meal but there was a special reason for being in London on a warm August evening. We were due to set off on a Corsican adventure the following morning.

Having a degenerative condition it is important to take advantage and explore parts of the world and experience the sights with these wonky eyes whilst they still have life left in them. I’d been keenly following the flight-free travel website, Byway, for some time now and the idea of trekking across Europe by train is something I’ve been keen to give a go. So this year we decided to try it out. Our chosen destination was the Mediterranean island of Corsica, about 100 miles off the French mainland. A small mountainous island, famous for being the birthplace of Napoleon Bonapart.

Our trip was planned to take us from London St Pancreas, through Paris to the southern port of Toulon where we would take the overnight ferry to Ajaccio where we had a few days to explore the city before taking a trip across the island to the northern port of Bastia and a slow homeward journey with stop offs in Nice and Paris and Byway made all the arrangements for us via their Concierge service. Now, being visually impaired and having so many connections to navigate in busy, unfamiliar stations was concerning to say the least, especially when none of us are particularly conversant in French. Thankfully the Concierge was able to support in arranging assistance at each point.

With this added piece of mind we were ready to set off on our adventure and arrived at St Pancreas on a hot August Sunday morning, full of anticipation for what was in store. At the station, the assistance area was clearly marked and so we made a beeline for the desk where they checked our tickets, ushered us through security checks and passport control and past the hundreds of waiting passengers up to the deserted platform and our waiting Eurostar train. When we arrived, they were still making the final preparations  so we got chatting to the assistant. She was absolutely fabulous and gave some essential advice on where to go once in Paris to find our connection from Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon and our onward train to the south coast. As we settled onboard, the gates opened and general boarding soon commenced with the carriage quickly filling up. Soon afterwards we pulled out of St Pancreas and slowly made our way to the dedicated high-speed line not far from the station. Once we had wound our way under London we emerged back out into the sunshine and before long the train was fast accelerating toward 300kph and the Channel Tunnel. What felt like no time at all, we were slowing down and entering the outskirts of Paris and just two and a half hours after leaving London we were on the platform at Gare du Nord.

There wasn’t anybody to meet us in Paris but as we had bought our Metro tickets on the train and the assistant in London had given us detailed instructions, we set off through the station to the Metro lines at the far end.

I mean, how hard can it be? After all, I’ve been using the London Underground for years!

Well, the Paris Metro is as much of a maze as the Tube and I’m sure anyone faced with navigating Paddington for the first time would be as daunted as we were in northern Paris but, lo, we found our platform and the train to Gare de Lyon arrived.

If you thought Gare du Nord was a labyrinth, that was nothing compared to Gare de Lyon but we soon found our way to the assistance office where Kath and the kids left me with the luggage whilst they set off to find food and the loo (which happened to be back the way we had come!). Just a few minutes after they left me, the assistant came across and advised we had to go to board our train so I hastily called Kath and they hightailed it back and we rushed off to find our train – another 10 minutes from our waiting area. The assistant helped us on board but had to leave us to find our seats as the train was imminently due to leave.

The train was packed and so Kath left us with the bags and headed off to find our seats. She checked the coach a couple of times and then looked down the next one but had no luck finding them. It was at this point the penny dropped and we realised this was a double-decker train and our seats were quite clearly downstairs so, as we quickly left Paris in our wake, we settled down in our seats for the 5 hour high-speed trip to Toulon.

The lessons we learned from this leg of the trip were:

• Make sure that everyone uses the toilet before getting off the train because French train stations are quite frugal with facilities and,
• Bring a packed lunch as 2 hours to get across Paris, find lunch and board a train is not as long as you think

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If you liked this account of our personalised flight-free trip and fancy taking a look for yourself then why not check out Byway.travel and see where they can take you.