tales of wander

If you had asked me yesterday morning what I thought of Italy’s railway system, my reply would’ve been “I love it!” It’s easy to understand, you can use an app to search the schedule and buy tickets, and the service is extensive, with lots of lines running all over the country. Since I got here, I’ve used the train system extensively and it never failed me. The only two things that I saw as a downside were: 

1. There is sometimes only 5 minutes to connect to your next train, so if your train is running late, there’s a chance you’ll miss your connection.
   
2. Sometimes—particularly on older trains—you don’t know what stop you’re at because there isn’t a display, there may not be an announcement, and you may not be able to see the sign for the stop. 

Up until yesterday, to deal with the latter, I just consulted the app to gauge where the train is and that worked fine. As for the former, late trains were never an issue because luck was on my side—when the train I was on was late, guess what?! The train I am connecting to is also late, so everything just sort of worked out.   

Then yesterday, all my train mojo ran out.

Yesterday was a train travel day to Naples. My first leg is a little under 3 hours and ends in Rome. Then, I connect to a high-speed, first-class train to Naples (this was a happy mistake and I’m excited to see what first-class is like). Everything is going smoothly, I’m listening to a Rick Steves episode about “the beautiful chaos” of Naples on my phone when I look at my app and realize the train I’m on is running late. Okay, not going to fret, there’s still time. By the time I’m on an episode about food, I realize my train is really late and I look at the status of my connection. The high-speed trains, as you might imagine, are more “on-time” than the slower, older ones, so my next train is on time, which means I may not make the connection. By the time my train is clearly in Rome, I’m a little panicked because my train is so late that there’s little-to-no hope of making it. I can’t tell which stop I’m at, consult my app, and in my haste, mis-read what it says and get off one stop too early. When I realize my mistake, I look at the app and see that it didn’t matter—my fancy, fast-speed connection already departed before my train even got to that station.

That’s all it took—in a little under 3 hours, I fell out of love. But, I still have to get to Naples, so with my  connection (and first-class experience) now gone, I have to book a new ticket. The next train leaving has one connection. Though I’m now wary of the connections, I think “it can’t happen again, right?,” so I book it. I get on the train and…you guessed it, it’s also running late and my connecting train is on time. I hope to God this isn’t going to happen again, but God is busy tending to all these blasted cathedrals and sure enough, by the time I race to the connecting platform, the next train is long gone. That’s TWO missed connections in a day, forcing me to buy a third ticket.

Though there’s more, I will leave it at this: what was supposed to be a 4-hour journey turned into over 10 hours. 

There was a positive ending. I did eventually get to my Airbnb in Naples (after getting lost because the link in the Airbnb app directed me to a church—maybe God is trying to tell me something about my repeated blasphemy?). When I arrived, I discovered my host gave me one of her other open apartments—one better and larger than the one I booked. It was too late and I was too tired to go to the market for essentials, so I ended the day by finding a little pizzeria nearby that made me a wood-fired Margherita pizza for all of 4 euros. God bless Naples.

And there you have it. The train system is lovely…until it just isn’t.