We finally made it to St Jean Pied de Port today after 30 hours of air travel, 5 hours on trains, and an unexpected night's stay in Paris.

Our first flight was Brisbane to Singapore with Qantas, went well with no hiccups. We had 5 hours at Singapore airport, not quite enough time to visit the Jewel but plenty to explore the other 3 terminals and visit the butterfly garden, cactus garden, and orchid display which made Graham very happy.

Next flight was Brisbane to Dubai, I forced myself to stay awake for the whole flight even though to help with jet lag at the other end. Emirates food and service on board was great, arriving for 4 hour layover in Dubai in the wee hours of the morning wasn't ideal as we were very red-eyed but struggled to sleep in seating because it was so cold (air conditioning).

Our next flight was Dubai to Paris, again with Emirates and a good flight. We were on a tight schedule from landing at CDG at 9.35am needing to catch a train at Montparnasse at 12.09pm, so had booked a shuttle connection through our travel agent for 10.30am at arrivals. At 11.10am despite many calls and message the driver still had not turned up, so we ended up ordering an uber. We arrived at Montparnasse at 12.25pm and had missed out initial planned train. The next available train would have cost another 700 euro, and the one after that would arrive in Bayonne at midnight with no chance of connection to St Jean Pied de Port. We were all very sleep deprived, so after a coffee and snack decided to stay the night in Paris and catch the early train to SJPDP the next day (unfortunately meant forfeiting our already paid accommodation in SJPDP).

We stayed in this very cute hotel apartment in Paris. This meant we had a free afternoon to go exploring and try some Parisian cuisine. Of course we found a cemetery to look through, which is one of our favourite things to do!

We visited the supermarket Lidl (very much like Aldi) and purchased baguette, cheese, chorizo, crème aux oeufs, melon, prosciutto, beer and wine. We got almost 10 hours sleep at the apartment for leaving to catch the train to Bayonne the next morning.

These are our happy faces in the first class carriage of the high speed train, before the train officials came and asked for our tickets and got very cranky with us for having done that wrong. Note for anyone who is travelling on Europe trains- the ticket from the station is your seat reservation only! And your Eurail passes must be activated in the Rail Planner app on your phone, before you get on the train. Thankfully the officials gave us a couple of hours to get the right app to do all this (we had purchased passes through travel agent in Australia). We swapped trains at Bayonne, and after 1 further hour finally arrived at our starting destination- 18,000km travelled so far, just to start our 800km walk!