Learning Experiences

I feel like I could write a travel guide just after one night’s experience flying back to Italy from Sweden this weekend. But after everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong, I still made it home in one piece, and I feel like a much better traveler for it.

Here are some tips for the next time any of you are flying into an airport in Italy and hoping to get from there to somewhere else in Italy:

DON’T expect trains to be running on Sunday evenings on a holiday weekend.
DO book trains ahead of time if you can.
DO look up where the train stations are in relation to the airports.
DON’T be afraid to call a taxi to get to a train station to catch an earlier train when you know the next one isn’t for at least 7 hours.
DO go to a hotel instead of sitting in a train station until 5 a.m.
DON’T book a room at the first hotel you see outside of the train station.
DON’T go to any hotels that give you the creeps.
DO ask more than one person in the airport for the best way to get somewhere.
DON’T panic, ever.

All in all I ended up taking a train home Monday morning instead of Sunday night even though my flight had landed in Treviso (outside of Venice) 40 minutes ahead of schedule which should have been plenty of time to make it to the train station 15 minutes away, to catch the 8:10 train, the last one until the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the bus I was told to take to the train station didn’t come until 20 minutes after that train had left, and didn’t leave the airport until 45 minutes later. By the time I finally made it to the train station at 10 p.m., the train at 3:30 a.m. was already full and the next train wasn’t until 5:20 a.m. By the time my train pulled into Santa Maria Novella in Florence at 8 a.m. Monday morning I was extremely happy to be back.