There’s a moment on the TGV from Basel to Paris where the French countryside just opens up. Fields, farmhouses, the occasional church spire catching the winter light. And it moves past you fast. Very fast.
My son and I were in the dining car. He had a curried pie. I had a German bier, which felt entirely appropriate given where we’d just come from. We weren’t doing anything particularly remarkable. We were just sitting there, watching Europe blur past the window at 250km/h, eating unremarkable train food, and talking. But for me, that was a moment.
Getting There
We’d spent the past week moving between Christmas Markets, using Basel as our base. It’s not a city that makes the top of most people’s Europe lists, and that’s partly what made it work so well. Relatively quiet, manageable, beautifully positioned on the Rhine with France on one side and Germany on the other. From Basel you can be in Strasbourg in 30 minutes, Munich in under three hours, and Salzburg not much longer. It absorbed us well between the bigger stops, gave us somewhere to call our home base, even for just a little while.
The train travel was something I hadn’t fully anticipated enjoying as much as I did. I’m usually the person optimising for the fastest route between two points, but I loooove trains and there’s something about European rail in December that slows your thinking down, whether you want it to or not. Sometimes it’s a snow-dusted platform. Sometimes it’s a hot coffee while you wait. But, every time, there’s no turbulence, no security queues, no tiny seats. Just movement, and landscape, and time to reconnect. Sometimes, it’s in the most unexpected places. Like the dining car.
The Dining Car at 250km/h and a Curried Pie
Taking my son to the dining car was a spontaneous call. My wife and daughter were settled, but he was restless, and I figured food fixes most things. Especially for a teenager who gets hangry.
What I didn’t plan for was the conversation.
Away from the routine of school runs and homework and the thousand small logistics that make up daily life back in Sydney, he just… talked. About the markets we’d been to and what he’d noticed. About what he wanted to do in Paris. Thirteen year olds aren’t always forthcoming with that kind of thing. You have to catch them in the right moment. A dining car doing 250km/h through the French countryside, apparently, is the right moment.
I thought about our trip to Krabi on this trip. That same feeling of the routine falling away and the kids filling the space with each other and with us. No devices pulling at them. No school friends to text. Just the family, and whatever was outside the window. It happened in Thailand on a beach. It happened again at 250km/h somewhere between Basel and Paris.
The Cold Helped
I should say something about the cold, because it was a feature of this trip in a way that surprised even me.
Coming from San Diego originally and having lived in Sydney for long enough that a 15-degree day feels brisk, you’d think a proper European December would have been a shock. But there’s Scandinavian blood in me somewhere, and it turns out the cold has never really bothered me the way it does some people. Dressed properly, it stops being something to endure and starts being something to enjoy.
And the cold earned us things. Every cafe stop felt earned. Every bowl of soup, every mug of Glühwein at a Christmas Market, every warm restaurant we ducked into between one cobblestone square and the next. The cold was the reason we stopped. And the stops were where the good stuff happened.
The dining car on the TGV was warm. Outside, which sped by at 250 km/hr, the fields were pale and flat and freezing. Inside, my son was telling me about something that had made him laugh in Salzburg and I was half-listening and half-just watching him talk, thinking about how quickly this version of him is going to be gone and replaced with the next one. I wanted this moment to last forever.
Paris Was Waiting
We knew what was at the end of the line. Paris in December, which I’ve written about before and which has a complicated relationship with its own reputation. But arriving by train is different to arriving by plane. The city comes to you gradually. You see the suburbs first, then the density builds, then suddenly you’re underground and then you’re there.
My son finished his pie somewhere around Dijon. I finished the bier not long after. We went back to my wife and daughter, who had managed perfectly well without us. We weren’t gone for long, but that period of time meant something to me. The curried pie, the German bier, the conversation about nothing in particular, and France going past at a speed that still feels slightly implausible. Some of the best moments of this whole trip were the ones between the destinations which, if I’m honest, is something I seem to keep learning and keep forgetting and keep learning again.
A Few Notes on the Basel to Paris TGV:
- Journey time: Around 3 hours direct. Faster than flying once you factor in airports. Personally, I wouldn’t consider anything else.
- Book ahead: Seats fill up, especially over the Christmas period. You can book through the SNCF or Rail Europe. I have also had great success with Trainline for last minute travel.
- The dining car: Yes, go. The food is not the point. The experience is.
- Basel as a base: Underrated. Central, calm, easy access to Germany, France and Switzerland. Give it more credit than most itineraries do. Also, if you’re there in the winter, the Kunsteisbhan Margarethen ice rink is a great place to visit. My kids, who do nothing for more than an hour, spent FOUR hours skating here. We connected, spun, fell, laughed, and loved every minute of it.
