| | It's just one letter difference, couldn't cause too much trouble, right? We woke up early to catch the commuter train out of Milan. The newly discovered limitations on our Eurail passes meant normally one free train in the morning, and one in the evening. Unfortunately, we took a little too long on breakfast, and made it to the station just barely under the wire for our 8:30 train to Genova. When we ordered our Eurail passes, they sent us a timetable book, so we could plan our trip in advance. It was published at the beginning of the year, though, so we were warned that all the times might not be accurate. When we got to the platform, it said 8:35 to Geneve. *Sigh of relief* we're not late, they just changed the train schedule. Spelling seemed to change quite a bit too: what we know as Florence is spelled 'Firenze' in Italian, and Venice turns into 'Venezia.' We were getting used to the fact that if our timetable book says one thing, the train station will probably say something different. So out of Milan we go. Annie digs into second breakfast, and Tasha and I settle into our book. Enter the conductor. This is where we discovered that Geneva is different from Genova, no matter what language you're speaking. Apparently, Genova is just a stop on a train going to another town (even though the timetable book said it terminated in Genova), so we completely missed the train we were supposed to get on. Instead, we were on a high speed (and high cost) train to Geneva, Switzerland. The conductor was really nice about it, though. She let us off at the next stop (without having to pay for our mistake), and gave us the times and trains that we would need to get where we were going. The stop in the north of Italy turned out really cool though, because while we were waiting for our train back to Milan, we hit a Basilica of the Assumption, which was really beautiful, and gave us a reminder that we had someone watching out for us. Once we got back to Milan and took our seats on the right train, we lost our tickets. Nothing huge. We had set them down on the seat, and the lady across from us picked them up, thinking they were hers. It ended up being a really good thing, though because as she gave them back, she asked if we had validated them (in Italian). It took us awhile to overcome language barriers, but found out that whenever you buy a ticket, you need to feed it into a machine at the beginning of the platform before the train leaves, or else you get a fine when they punch it on the train. I got a chance to run full-tilt down the length of the platform, in order to get them stamped, and we learned yet another valuable lesson about the Europe train system. This post has been very much about our learning curve. You don't use trains like this very often in the US, and we discovered the system isn't quite self-explanatory. Now, don't tell any concerned mothers that may (or may not) be reading this, but the last part of our train learning curve caused a pretty radical change of plans for the next leg of our journey. Free or not, there turned out to be only one train that went from our area to Lourdes. It left from Nice, France at 10 am on Thursday. The problem was, the earliest we could get there from Milan was 10:45. We had a reservation on Wednesday night in Avignon, but getting from there to Nice proved even more difficult (which was pretty weird, because of how much closer they are together). To catch our train, we decided to cancel our hotel in Avignon (we wouldn't be able to use it anyway), and just stay the night in the Nice train station. Annie's comment on it was “What's a trip to Europe without spending a night in a station?” It couldn't be that bad, my sister stayed on a bench in a German station on her way back from World Youth Day in Cologne, and on his Europe trip, my older brother actually spent a couple nights in trees after getting locked out of his hostel. Besides, everything we saw said the town was really Nice. So, apparently the Blessed Mother had different plans (does she count as a concerned mother?) We got to Nice without any further complications. To avoid any more complications, we decided to buy our tickets to Lourdes right away (and validate them), so that we would be sure that all the connections would work. It was Wednesday afternoon, and the guy at the counter tells us that tomorrow there would be a nationwide strike by all train and bus workers, so we wouldn't be able to get out of Nice until Friday night. With two and a half days to stay, we definitely needed lodging, so we struck out across the town to find a plan B. |
