Near Disaster

On Friday morning I went to the train station in Brussels to make reservations for a leg of my trip from Holland to Switzerland in a few days. I needed to get from Amsterdam to Lausanne I had looked at the French trains website and typed in "Amsterdam to Lusanne". It offered Lozanne as a choice for destinations, so I figured it was just a spelling translation as many European cities are spelled differently in different languages. It did strike me as odd though because I thought that Lausanne was in the French speaking part of Switzerland. The route said I needed to take a train from Brussels to Lyon and then a local train to Lozanne. I went to make a reservation for the train to Lyon and was told the train was full (at least for Eurail pass holders (more on that subject later)). She suggested I connect through Paris. I said I needed to think about it.
I pulled out my Eurail timetable and looked for alternate routes. Somewhere in this process I realized that the train from Lyon to Lozanne was less than a hour and that couldn't possibly be the right destination since the train from Lyon to Geneva took longer than that. Upon further searching I discovered that my spelling "Lusanne" was incorrect and it should have been "Lausanne." There were trains from Paris to Lausanne that did not go through Lyon or Geneva. I booked a ticket for the route Brussels to Paris and Paris to Lausanne. If the train from Brussels to Lyon hadn't been full, it is very possible that I could have ended up in Lyon or Lozanne before I realized my mistake. Fortunately that didn't happen.
For my trip I had purchased a Eurail flexipass which gave me 10 days of railtravel for $450 (360E) or so. That comes out to $45 (36E) a day if you aren't so good at math. I found that it did save me money, but you really had to use it strategically. I used it for longer trips like Roscof to Orleans70E, Orleans to Bordeaux 35E, Bordeaux to Nîmes 40E, Nîmes to Brussels150E, Amsterdam to Gryon 140E and a few other long ones. I took lots of shorter trips as well where it was not worthwhile to use the pass (examples about 20E for the day trip to Brugge, 24E from Brussels to Amsterdam). I found that I really had to seach for longer trips to make the pass worthwhile. This was especially hard in Italy where it is nearly impossible to find a train that costs more than 40E. In the end it was nice to have a Eurail pass, but it didn't save as much money as I thought it would. Those two 100E plus trips could have been avoided if I had made my itenitary more geographically logical. With the pass it didn't really matter though.
The worst thing about having the pass was the need to make reservations for high speed trains in advance of the trip. You could not make these reservations online, you had to go to a station and talk to an agent. The cost of these ranged from 3E to 15E depending on the country. I discovered that many trains limit the number of Eurail pass holders allowed on the train. In France I was often told trains were full for pass holders despite having extra seats for normal customers. The Thalys trains were also bad for limiting seats. Another bad thing about the pass was that in smaller train stations the ticket agents would look at the thing and have no idea what it was or how to make a reservation in the computer. I got to practice my french a lot in those situations. In Nîmes I was charged a 30E supplement for a Thalys reservation. Luckily I knew that was incorrect and got a partial refund to the proper 12E price while I was in Paris. My Eurail pass experience can be summed up as follows: If you use it strategically, you can save a lot of money. It is often difficult to travel on the train you want. You should be flexible with times and dates and be prepared to communicate with station agents who do not speak English.