Trains, buses, subways, ferries, gondolas, boats

Boat ride in Amsterdam

Berlin Central Train Station - Hauptbahnhof

A lock on the Danube River

In Switzerland

We had a Eurail pass which provided us with an app on my phone in which I could schedule trains from just about any city in Europe to any other city. The pass pretty much covered all of our transportation around Europe. Trains were almost all on time or within a few minutes of their scheduled departure. All we had to do was figure what platform to arrive at and wait for the train with a bunch of other people. It pulled up to the platform, we got on and it took off. We realized pretty quickly that the trains wouldn’t wait around for both of us to get on so we were careful that both of us were ready to board at the same time so as not to lose each other. Fortunately we never got separated though Don was hit by a closing door on the Paris subway. He didn’t get hurt but it could have been bad. It took me a while to figure out how to get our tickets up on my phone and a few times the train officials just let me go seeing as I had the pass. But eventually it caught up with me. On the train from Switzerland into Italy, the conductor was having none of it and we ended up paying unnecessarily for that trip. It didn’t take me long to figure out what I needed to do to avoid that happening again. Some trains, especially the high-speed trains required that we pay extra to reserve seats.

We also used buses and subways to get around cities though sometimes we use a taxi especially to get to hotels that were farther than we wanted to walk from the train station. We got pretty good at finding hotels close to the train stations by the end but had some not very pleasant experiences trying to find public transportation. In Trieste, we got some bad advice from someone on the bus stop as to which bus to take and we got on the bus, not realizing that we couldn’t buy a pass on the bus. We got off that bus and waited for another bus. A bus “police” official confronted us and made us get off the bus. She was joined by about 4 other uniformed officials who informed us that “ignorance is no excuse”. We were fined 70 Euros each and they were happy to accept our credit card. Then they were nice enough to tell us which bus we needed to get to our hotel. Actually, it wasn’t a hotel really but that’s another story for my page about hotels.

Lots of learning experiences and stressful moments.

We learned pretty quickly to look both ways and make sure that we didn’t stray into bicycle lanes all over Europe. In most cities there are many more bikes than there are cars on the road. In Italy, there were thousands of Vespas and other small motorcycles. I particularly liked Paris as there weren’t so many cars on the road. On Monday morning we came out of our hotel and looked to the right to see hundreds of bicycles coming down the street on their morning commute. Bikes everywhere. I told Don that I thought all of that French bread at the breakfast buffet is “bike fuel”. That’s why no one is fat.