Since it’s cheaper to book a train ticket between Paris and Barcelona if you break the ticket in Perpignan and I needed to add a hotel stay somewhere anyway, I stopped in Perpignan for the night and booked a train the next afternoon to finish the journey.

The evening clerk couldn’t figure out if I have a reservation or not. It turns out he kept flipping my first and last name despite the fact that on a US passport the fields are also labeled in French. Then he missed a tax when he charged my credit card.

When checking out the next day, the morning clerk decided that he couldn’t hold my bag because the hotel would be “closed” in the afternoon. Since the train station is too small to still have a left luggage office I was stuck with it in the train station for five hours.

Thing is, there’s a perfectly good American chain hotel directly attached to the station.