Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Thursday the 23rd of February

and I have the great pleasure of talking to you from Compienne in northern France. Now you may not

know this town but I think it will be somewhat on the map in the summer of 2024.

That's because it's one of a select number of towns within easy reach of Paris by rail.

It takes about 40 minutes on a fast train and it costs about £12.

And therefore, during the Paris Olympics, it's going to be a really good idea to stay somewhere like this.

Paying normal hotel prices rather than to be in the centre of the capital

where you can be pretty sure that

hoteliers will be travelling their rates. The thing is you want somewhere which is both a pleasant

place to be and also of interest and I think it would be very difficult to find anywhere which

matches compien for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I'm walking past the chateau. It is a vast place. If you've been to Versailles

just outside Paris or to Fontainebleau to the southeast of Paris, you will get the idea.

It is one of the great houses of France.

The work was done largely for Napoleon and it has some astonishingly furnished rooms as well, of course, as the spectacular bore room. It's slightly more, I would say,

austere than extremely elaborate Versailles, but on the other hand, it's very accessible and

very uncrowded, which is good. There's also a very odd museum of the car and tourism,

which even though I like cars and I like tourism,

I slightly struggled with.

My apologies for that.

Very importantly, there is also a sombre memorial

in the woods about four miles outside compien and this is the surrender carriage

...