We're planning the details now of our vacation in Switzerland, Germany and France. Has anyone traveled by train recently in Europe? We've heard that we need to reserve high speed rail train tickets in advance. This makes me a little bit nervous as they are not refundable! There is ONE (!) train that would get us from Zurich to Paris and then to the Loire valley by the evening of the day we have reservations in Amboise. In order to make the connection, we have a 7 minute walk between two gares (train stations) while in Paris during the one hour between trains. We then have to catch a 20 minute ride to our hotel when we arrive in the Loire valley. This makes me nervous to reserve!

Do trains run on time from Switzerland to France? (I would think that they would!) Has anyone had experience in the Loire valley getting around? I'm positive if we arrived late at night in Paris we could get to our hotel--I'm not as sure we'll be able to get a ride from the Tours train station to Amboise. The website for our hotel says we can arrange to be picked up by the hotel for a fee which I think we'll choose to do BUT they don't start really operating until Feb. 1.

Our reservations are in mid April. DH wants to reserve the TGV tickets NOW. Is that necessary? Like there's a difference in reserving in advance for a train ticket and a plane ticket, right? Like 2.5 months ahead (Feb. 1) should be plenty of time to get TGV reservations locked down? I think I'd just feel more comfortable knowing for sure we could get to our hotel that night no matter what...Hotel reservations are totally refundable up to 3 days before we stay but TGV reservations are NOT refundable.

Any other tips for riding high speed rail? We plan on taking several of these while in France. Back in the day I had some experience riding trains and felt quite comfortable but that was in the late 90s. Pre-911, Pre-COVID and over 20 years ago!

TIA!