A long night in Italy (Recent Travels, Part I)

Well! It's been a month (and a whirlwind of activity!) since the last post. The days have been going by so fast, and we've been all over the place.

Not long after my last blog update, Chris and I said goodbye to the Peace Factory and thumbed our way back across France, but this time with Italy as our destination. There, we met up with my parents, who came to Europe for a few weeks to travel and see old friends (and us!). In Tuscany they had rented rooms in a villa along with a few other couples who are longtime friends from Oregon. We made it there in time to spend two nights with them in this beautiful old stone house that once was a monastery. A highlight was the plum tree that was just ripening and gave us a few delicious plums each day.

Which reminds me, I should backtrack a bit. Our journey out there was an interesting one. Hitchhiking took us to Montpelier, Nîmes, Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence, where we were lucky enough to catch a ride with an Italian who could take us most of the rest of the way. We knew we couldn't make it all the way to Tuscany in one day, so we planned to find a place to spend the night around Genoa and then take the train the rest of the way the next morning. This Italian businessman was on his way home to Milano, so he'd be turning off the highway just before Genoa. Now it could have been partly that he spoke very little French or English and we spoke very little Italian (well, virtually none), but I think it was mostly that he was just a bit mixed up as to where we were. He recommended dropping us off a while before Genoa because there was a larger road-side service station where we'd be more likely to get a ride the rest of the way than if he took us further, where there were only small stops. So he left us, saying that if all else failed we were just up the hill from Savona, and it would only take a few minutes to walk into the town. Sounded fine to us. And we didn't have a map of Italy, so we couldn't verify. Not that we thought to question him anyway, he being Italian and us not being very familiar with Italy. The service station turned out to be a bust; hardly anyone came through it, and the sun was getting low on the horizon. We decided to walk into Savona and see if we could just catch a train from there, or find some place to sleep, like maybe the beach, for the night.

The walk into town was amazing. Fruit trees galore! Most of them were in people's yards, but when they hung out over the road and we could reach them, or pick up fruits that had fallen to the ground, we didn't stop ourselves. We were soon stuffed with plums and peaches, and in our giddy delight we never stopped to think that maybe we weren't in Savona after all. It was a few kilometers to the beach; we figured we must be on the outskirts of town and that if we made it to the beach we'd be able to walk along until we got to the downtown area. I'd actually been in Savona once before, though only for a few hours, and remembered that the train station was really close to the beach, so this seemed like a good thing to do. And oh was it nice to put our feet in the Mediterranean after a long hot day of traveling!

The beach was all built up and sectioned off into terraces with lounge chairs, like much of the European Mediterranean coast is. Not so good for finding a place to sleep. We kept walking and ended up talking to someone who pointed out the train station to us off in the distance. It didn't look familiar to me, but we kept on our way and found ourselves in a very small little downtown area of what turned out to be Ceriale, which turned out to be about 40 kilometers away from Savona. Right, just down the hill. It was almost dark by the time we found the tiny Ceriale train station. The ticket booth had a sign saying that it was closed indefinitely (indefinitamente; didn't need to know Italian to figure that one out). The automatic ticket machine didn't work. It was too dark to hitchhike and there didn't seem to be any place to stay. We eventually found a bus going in the right direction, and were lucky enough to get to the stop right before the last bus of the evening passed (though the bus came 20 minutes late, when we were about to give up on it, thinking that maybe the schedule had changed or we were reading the timetable wrong). This bus took us to Finale, about 30 minutes down the road, where we were a bit bothered to find that the automatic ticket machine in that train station was also broken, and the ticket booth didn't open again until 6 the next morning (the train we wanted to take from Genoa to Florence left at 7, so we would have had to leave Finale earlier than 6 to get there on time). After wandering around for a couple of hours, we ended up finding another bus to take us to Savona. We reached the Savona train station in the wee hours of the morning and found that the automatic ticket machine there was also broken. We weren't too surprised by this point. We thought we'd take our chances getting on a 4:30 am train to Genoa anyway and seeing if we could buy the tickets from the conductor. We had a couple of hours to kill and we were pretty exhausted, so we lay down under a tree out the back of the station. The noise of air conditioners and the occasional creepy people walking by kept us from sleep, so we moved inside into the waiting room, which was stuffy but quiet, and slept for an hour or so.

We woke up and got out of the waiting room just after 4, and went out to the platform from which our train was supposed to leave. No one was there yet except for a couple of technicians who were wandering in and out of the train with worried looks on their faces. People began trickling out onto the platform, and then when the conductor arrived she was informed by the technicians that the train was not working. It seemed like they didn't quite know what was wrong with it either. The display board started showing delays, and after an hour's wait with still no working train we started looking around at the other trains and found that one was leaving soon for Pisa, which would take us pretty close to our destination, between Pisa and Florence. Although it ended up being almost 2 hours late, by some miracle this train worked, and we were indeed able to buy our tickets on the train. Things had started looking up! We slept most of the way, but occasionally I awoke to look out the window and see the beautiful land we were zooming through.

My parents ended up just coming up to Pisa to pick us up, which was a relief, as with all the little connections we would have had to take to get to our final destination, and given our luck with the Italian transport system thus far, we may have never made it. Several times during all of this we thought, If only we'd kept hitchhiking all the way!

So, that was our long journey to Italy. I'll stop this post here and continue the tales in a new one!