I was asked to share one of my most”entertaining” memories from traveling, the idea being that the more trouble something is at the time the better story it makes later. Well, I don’t know how much of what I remember here is what actually happened, but thought I would share it with everyone else.
The story that comes to mind is the one from when I was backpacking awhile ago and our train was late getting into Milan. My two friends and I, and every single other backpacker on the train, was at the door eyeing our watches as we pulled into the station. There had been announcements on the intercom, but between our horrible Italian and the static-riddled nature of the messages we had no idea if the train we were supposed to catch had left or not.
We hit the ground running almost before the doors were fully open and raced into the station proper only to discover that, yes, we had all missed our train.
But it wouldn’t be a problem, because our tickets would carry over to the next train! Except there was an entire train load of backpackers that were catching the next train with us. Oh! And all of the cabins were already taken and our cabin tickets wouldn’t carry over, leaving us all to fend for ourselves in the halls.
So we sat on little half benches that folded out of the walls outside the cabins, all thirty or forty or so of us, standing whenever someone had to pass through the narrow aisle or piled into the slightly wider spaces in front of the doors on either end of the car. We were crushed and crowded together, we barely had one and a half shared languages between us, there was little air conditioning, we were all sleep deprived, and the train seemed to bump and bang throughout all of its route.
But strangely enough, we had a blast.