Missed Connections

So when I said 5 trains and 3 cable cars from the mountains to the beaches, I really meant 7 trains and 3 cable cars. See what happened was, we got through all 5 trains and pulled into Riomaggiore station and for reasons that cannot me explained we didn’t get off the train. Should it be the door latch that we didn’t open, should it be that we were on the back of the train and the stop looked like we were still in the tunnel… A lot of things went wrong there.
So next stop, we hop off thinking, hey let’s just catch the next train back one stop. Easy.
Funny thing is, there were all kinds of train delays so the train that we were to get on and off the next stop was delayed (missed that announcement) and the train we did get on was a EuroStar train that was nice and clean, did that trigger anything with us? No.
After hopping on, the ticket agent asks where we are going, we reply that we missed our stop and we are taking the next stop at Riomaggiore. Mind you, train is in motion, fast speed, still no triggers for us. This is what made my heart stop, just for second, when he replied “this train goes to Genoa, it does not stop”. What!?!! We had just spent the last hour and 56 min on a trashy, trashy local from Genoa to get to Rio and here we were back on the effing train to Genoa.
Good news- it took us only an hour to get back to the starting point instead of the almost two it took us earlier.
Bad news- we had a 2 min connection time to the next train back.
Good news- we met a girl from NZ that had the exact same troubles so at least we made a friend and she wasnt alone trying to trek back.
We managed to make our connections and the grumpy ticket agent even helped us get on the right train. To celebrate our no dinner/train misshap/late arrival we opened a bottle of red wine on the train and shared a glass with our new Kiwi friend and settled into the long train ride back.
7 trains, 3 cable cars, 15 hours, one bottle of wine and countless stairs led is to the beach.

Advertisement