Just In The Nick Of Time

In the past 5 years we have journeyed three times to Italy and loved every minute. The one thing that our trips had in common was the train travel between cities. We planned out trips down to the half-day and pre-purchased our train tickets online. As frequently happens on our vacations, the agendas become shuffled and we are sometimes unavoidably detained. This was the case in 2017 while we traveled with dear friends of ours.

The setting was Venice and we were traveling to Rome for the final week of our trip. We had all made several purchases in both Florence and Venice and decided it would be best to ship them home rather than lug them to and through Rome. Well, navigating the Italian postal service was quite the adventure. From the paperwork to the actual packing of the items, this quest took precious time and caused quite the delay in our departure.

When we realized that we needed to catch the train in the next 40 minutes, Steven and our friends made their way to the hotel to retrieve our luggage, while I went to the train station to see if we could change our tickets to a train leaving an hour after our originally scheduled departure. Unfortunately, the tickets could not be revised or refunded and, if we didn’t want to purchase another set of tickets, we needed to make it on our scheduled train!

 

I located the platform for our train and waited for the other members of our group to arrive with our luggage. As they came flying up the stairs at Santa Lucia, I joined our group and we sprinted to the train’s numbered platform, praying that the train didn’t depart with half of us on board and the other half on the platform. We looked like two couples crossing the finish line in the Amazing Race! The train began to move as we made our way down the aisle to our seats, but much to our surprise, they were already occupied. Negotiations were short as we showed them our reserved tickets. We were finally able to store our luggage and settle into our seats as the train reached maximum speed.

 

We laughed so hard we cried and vowed to never cut the train travel that close again. With the excitement behind us, we took turns napping and enjoying the hilltop towns and fields of sunflowers fly by.

We learned a valuable lesson on that trip – while we had planned well and made it on board the train, we didn’t allow for the unexpected complications of shipping the package. We knew better than to believe we wouldn’t need to have Plans B and C waiting in the wings. From now on, we will research the location and requirements of the postal service office before we leave home. The package did arrive at our home about 3 weeks later, mostly in one piece and the items inside unharmed. Between the train and package, we counted those as two wins! After all, we were able to save the cost of new train tickets and use those funds in Rome!