It sounded like a great idea; my sister and I were traveling in Austria and wanted to meet up with my family in Rome to go on to Sicily. Except the train that we were supposed to take got rerouted due to a storm, so by five hours in, we were back where we started. Awesome.
We had to go over to Switzerland and start working our way down to Rome. However, we were now on slower rails, and our train was delayed by 10 hours. By the time we got to Rome, we missed our flight to Sicily.
Fine. We’ll take a train again. We were supposed to get in to Sicily around 8 am, so I woke up a little before then and started getting ready. However, the nun below us said something about being in Calabria. When I asked my sister, who looked horrified, what the problem was, she responded that ‘we were not even in the tip of the boot yet’. Oh dear.
The bathrooms were a disaster, so I couldn’t even brush my teeth the entire ride. And by disaster, I mean that the same nun came back from her bathroom trip with wide eyes, muttering, “excremento…” Not good.
We eventually made it, and somehow found where we were supposed to go. After 42 hours on the train, we were happy to eat some Italian cooking.