THE TRAINS WON’T WAIT!

The journey continues from The Slow Boat On Lake Como.

Backpacking through Europe can feel so simple, but backpacking and taking trains, while you have a baby, definitely poses some challenges.

The plan for this trip included a lot of train travel and one consideration that we took into account was minimising the duration of each train between destinations. This was mainly because we didn’t know how Miss Adventure would handle it. She was still on two naps per day and there was no guarantee at this point (or ever really…) that she would nap on the move.

When we were planning this trip, we knew that this part of the journey was going to be the longest travel day by train. The route was from Como to Milan, change trains then, Milan to Genoa, change trains then, Genoa to Sori.

Our online sources were telling us that it would take a whopping 3.5 hours – what’s the worst that could happen? We survived the 12-hour plane ride.

After the mishap with missing our train from Switzerland to Italy, we felt more prepared than ever. We arrived at the train station in record time, so early that I had a cheeky little espresso at the bar.

Of course our train was delayed.

Despite the delay, Miss Adventure kept herself busy by chasing pigeons, at break-neck crawling speed, around the train station, and waving at fellow travellers, which was her newly discovered favourite thing to do.

Eventually, we left Como and arrived at Milan train station.

Once we’d located the next train and boarded, we realised that our assigned seats were to the middle of the carriage, which seemed like too much of a distance from the door. We popped our luggage near the exit and sat as close as we could to it. Keep in mind, we were travelling with two big travel backpacks, a portacot on a trolley, a travel pram, a nappy bag, a food bag and a backpack of essentials (passports etc). It felt like such an awkward amount of luggage to have, so we didn’t like to be too far away from it. If you want to find out more about what we packed for this trip, you can read about it here.

We were sitting in the train ready to go and the train didn’t move. Fantastic – another delay. But by this stage, it was nap time for Miss Adventure, so she didn’t get to experience another long delay.

Once we got moving, the passengers who were actually assigned the seats that we were currently sitting in, arrived and seeing we had a sleeping baby on our laps, let us stay there and they took the seats in front of us.

We only got away with this for a few more stops and the passengers that were assigned to the seats of the people who were assigned to the seats of the seats we were currently sitting in boarded. This created a domino effect of seat shuffling and we had to move to our assigned seats, which were smack-bang in the middle of the carriage, by the window. We were officially blocked in.

Luckily we were blocked in by a nice Italian couple who spoke very broken English, but were very keen travellers. They were smitten by Miss Adventure and wanted to know all about her travels, as a worldly 9-month old.

Mike always runs checks on Google maps to see where we are during transit, some trains don’t include any electronic signage displaying the next stop, so there can be a lot of guesswork involved. We figured there was 2 stops before we got to Genoa, so we bided our time before making Miss Adventures’ new friends move.

It wasn’t 2 stops though, the next stop was our stop, so as the train pulled into the station, the clock started.

The aisle was no longer free; it was full of people waiting to get off. We couldn’t move and we couldn’t hustle as we normally would.

Holding Miss Adventure, I flung the food backpack over my shoulder and grabbed the pram, rushing to the door. Mike helped me down the stairs (why are the stairs so steep?!) and handed me the nappy bag. As I was unfolding the pram, Mike ran over with the portacot on the trolley and jumped back in the train to grab our big backpacks.

That’s when we learnt the valuable lesson: THE TRAINS WILL NOT WAIT FOR YOU.

The doors closed. Mike was locked in the train. Miss Adventure and I, stuck on the platform. This is when the panic usually kicks in. It was like that scene in the movies when the two characters look at each other through the window of a locked door, the music swells, and we as the audience know that they are never going to see each other again. Or at least that’s what it felt like…

We had one phone with an active SIM, which I had, and no other way of communicating with each other because we didn’t expect something like this to happen. The conductors were nowhere in sight. No amount of yelling or knocking stopped the train from pulling away as all Mike could do was promise to find his way back to us.

The biggest worry at this point in time was that Mike may have been on an express train to La Spezia, which was an hour journey (one way) away.

A million things ran through my mind – how long should I wait for Mike to return? What do I do if he doesn’t come back soon? Where do I go? I didn’t plan on doing a solo backpacking trip through Europe, as a new mum with a baby.

Meanwhile, Miss Adventure was happily sitting in her pram yelling “gah” at the pigeons, fresh from her rare on-the-go nap.

I figured the best move was to find the platform for the train to Sori, so that in the worst-case scenario, I could journey on by myself.

The relief I felt when I saw that the train station had a working lift was incredible (this we found was a rarity when travelling around Europe) – it meant we could move between platforms without leaving things behind.

The two of us, plus the luggage, navigated our way through the underpass to find the old-school paper timetable up on the wall. Unfortunately there was no one around who could help us so I  tried my best to decipher what I was reading, which was tricky, because the train we’d just been on had been delayed, so no times aligned.

I decoded the timetable and worked out that the train Mike was stuck on should make one more stop at another station in Genoa. Miss Adventure and I made our way up to the platform that will take us to our next destination, Sori, hoping that Mike would have found a train that came straight back to us.

Luck would have it that the train Mike was on did have one more stop in Genoa, so all he had to do was hop off, change platforms and come back, which only set us back about 30 minutes.

While giving Miss Adventure a snack, we both looked up and to our relief, saw Mike walking towards us. We were reunited!

We only had a 10 minute wait until the next train and we rolled towards Sori feeling fantastic but absolutely exhausted.

We basically stood at the doors with everything, ready to disembark in record time – there was no way that one of us were going to miss this stop.

We made it, finally, to Sori.

From the train station, the road to our accommodation was all downhill, our luggage felt rather weighty, so the downward slope was needed. A trip that was only supposed to take us 3.5 hours, took over 7 hours.

Walking into our AirBnB made our mood do a full 180 – the view was stunning, overlooking the sea, the town and the local outdoor swimming pool. After a stressful day in transit, it was time to enjoy our time in Sori.

See you on the road!