Sometimes when traveling, things don’t work out the way you plan them to. This last trip had us feeling like the Griswalds on European Vacation and at times we wondered if anything would go right at all. How bad could it be? Well, let’s start this way: it took us 4 days just to get out of Spain…
The trouble began even before we started packing. With Rob working remotely via the internet, the worst possible scenario occurred: the laptop crashed. Fortunately for us it is still under warranty, but it would take a while to get fixed. This gave us the perfect window to go see Greece and Italy. (And the perfect excuse for not having the website updated!)
Our plan was to go leave Friday morning (the 17th of March, St. Patrick’s Day), spend a few days in Rome, take a ferry to Greece, and then stop in at a few more places in Italy on our back to Spain. Friday morning comes and no sooner did we get in the taxi to the train station when we realized that we forgot our train tickets. By the time Rob jumped out of the cab, ran home, grabbed the tickets, and took another taxi to the train station, the train was just pulling out of the station. To get to Italy from Sevilla, the best way is to go through Barcelona. On this particular day, though, the rest of the trains to Barcelona from Sevilla were sold out. Still determined to leave, we took the next train to Madrid hoping that we could find a train from there.
On our way to Madrid we realized that we had misread the train schedule. The train from Barcelona to Milan, Italy doesn’t leave on Fridays. It doesn’t leave on Saturdays, either. If we were going to take the train to Italy, we would have to wait until Sunday night. After a little research, we found out that there is a ferry from Barcelona to Rome that leaves on Saturdays. If we could get to Barcelona, then there was hope that we could get to Italy by Sunday morning.
But we would not be getting to Barcelona to work that out, at least not yet. All the trains from Madrid were sold out as well. The closest we could get was a city called Zaragosa on a train that left 6 hours later, so we bought the tickets and found ourselves a tiny Irish bar in Madrid where we celebrated St. Paddy’s Day the best way we knew how.
To cap off our night, we arrived in Zaragosa just before midnight, waited 45 minutes for a taxi, and had the driver take us to hostel which we soon found out was booked. Oh, and did I mention that it has started raining by this point? Tired, wet, and sick of carrying very heavy backpacks, we shelled out the extra cash to stay in a hotel hoping that the next day would bring us better luck.
It didn’t. Although we were able to get to Barcelona without a problem, the ferry to Rome was sold out. Our final option for getting to Italy was now to wait one more day and take the train. Fortunately for us we had been in Barcelona before (it’s where we started this whole trip back in December), and knew of a decent and cheap place to stay. Unfortunately for us, we were given two beds that were setup in a hallway leading to the bathroom. After a horrible night of sleep, and there was no way we were going to use the nasty showers, we fled the hostel and hid out at a movie theater showing original language movies until our train left for Milan, Italy.
Welcome to Italy! So after 4 days and 400 Euros, we finally arrived in Milan, 2 hours late. At this point in the trip, so much had already happened we thought that we had exhausted our bad luck. Not quite. There is much more to tell, but you’ll have to read about it in the Greece and Italy sections as this one is running long. But here we will leave you with one final note on the bad luck of our journey. The train station in Milan has hundred of pigeons living in its rafters. As we were within arms reach of our first destination of Rome, adding insult to injury, the pigeons of Milan decided to drop gifts from the sky which landed on both of us. And this trip had only just begun.
