It seemed like a good idea when we planned it: take the train to Venice. We even managed to get seats together despite booking at different times in different countries.
So, we got up, drove to the train station in Chambery (rather than start in Grenoble which is 30 minutes away just to sit for a couple of hours in the train station in Chambery which is 45 minutes away). And we waited. And waited. And waited. I found out that I can understand an announcement made in French about how late your train is. I got a lot of practice at it. The train finally rolled up to the platform about 30 minutes after it was supposed to have pulled away from it.
While Bill and Patrick were struggling to get all our big luggage into the luggage rack, I got to practice more French … trying to get a woman out of one of our seats. She told me how she has a bad foot or leg or something and that she took that seat because of that. Seemed like a lame excuse. What she’d taken was a seat with a table that faced another seat instead of a seat that has a tray table on the back of the next seat. I told her she was in our seat. She repeated her sob story about her bum leg. I repeated that she was in our seat. She asked why we didn’t sit across the aisle. I told her were were.. that we were taking up all six seats in that spot. I couldn’t remember the word for seat. So I just said it in English. I finally remembered how to tell her all six of us were together. (My French gets worse when I’m flustered) Basically, she just kept repeating her story and I just kept repeating mine… with the benefit of waving my ticket with that seat number on it in front of her. Finally, she relented and got up and moved. I am fairly sure she didn’t bother to move back to her actual seat. I don’t care. Let her go fight with someone who can fight back better. After we sat down, the little old lady behind me tapped me on my shoulder. Vous etes la droit. Or something like that. I had to ask her to repeat herself. She was trying to tell me I was right. That made me feel better.
It took forever to get from Chambery to Milan. It seemed like whoever is in charge of train schedules decided that since ours was already late, they’d just make it really late. We stopped on the tracks. We went really, really slowly. We arrived 55 minutes late. That was a problem… since we’d only given ourselves 10 minutes to change trains there. Our train was long gone.
Bill and Patrick were appointed ticket-fixers. They went to the international ticket window to be told to go to a different window. There our tickets were stamped and given a signature and we were told to get onto the next train: leaving in 5 minutes. So we ran to the platform and jumped on. The train had no assigned seats. It had compartments, which were all full. It had aisles, which were equally full. We had six people, five suitcases (two oversized, one weighing more than 50 pounds), two backpacks plus Kaitlyn’s Nemo backpack. Bill said he wasn’t riding for three hours on this #)$(I%()!!! train and got off. We followed… and got off seconds before the whistle blew and the train pulled away. Bill and Patrick went back to the window and told the man the train he tried to put us on was full. He seemed annoyed that we hadn’t accepted his generous offer of the free (not really free, we’d bought first class tickets) ride. He begrudgingly put us on the next train. We got on and couldn’t believe it. It was a Euorstar train. This one had assigned seats. And tables. And luggage racks. And a food car. The conductor looked at our tickets and told us to take any seats we wanted, the train wasn’t full. There was hardly anyone on it. And it was faster than the original train, to boot. We left later than that first train and got to Venice earlier. Amazing. Remember… traveling in Italy you don’t want the local train if you can avoid it.
We nearly got off at the wrong stop, but that disaster was avoided at the last minute. And finally…. we made it to Venice.