artesia train: booked!

I've just booked a double sleeper on the Artesia overnight train Paris-Rome! Feeling very pleased with myself, because I managed to negotiate the first part of the booking in French, thereby avoiding being transferred to the Rail Europe Australian site (which I couldn't convince to give me compartment options - just first or second class, and first class was only available as a four person compartment - we definitely wanted a double sleeper, just for us). My other Australian option was through Railplus, but it would have cost about $A150 more!

In case it helps anyone else, I went to the Artesia site, switched to French, selected the www.voyages-sncf.com option (on the left, under Réservez) and put in the rest of the trip details (fairly easy to figure out the form, even for a French novice like me). That transferred me to www.voyages-sncf.com (still in French at this point), where I needed to add more details, and I selected 'Australie' in the country list at the bottom. I was then redirected to www.tgv-europe.com - in English! From there I just followed the prompts, and even had an option for free postage of the tickets to Australia, so I don't have to muck around with retrieving the tickets from a machine in Paris.

You may be able to shortcut this by going straight to the TGV Europe site, but this way worked for me, and I saved nearly $150!

Artesia Palatino - day
[photo: www.seat61.com]

Artesia Palatino - night
[photo: www.seat61.com]