My wife and I took a trip to Italy. We piggybacked on a work trip she was doing, scheduling a vacation in on top of it. That way, we only had to pay for my ticket. It was as if she got to see Italy for free.
Getting there was a little crazy. I had to do it all on my own, because my wife had already come a few days ahead of me, but worse, I was only following her instructions the whole way. She'd set the whole thing up, and I was just following her honey-do list to get there. I usually don't pay enough attention to my wife's honey-do list to understand it without asking several follow-up questions later...only she wasn't available for that this time, so I was pretty nervous about doing something wrong...and being lost in Frankfurt or soemething.
So, I took a flight from Houston to Frankfurt. It was a ten hour flight, and I was jammed in the middle between a couple of people...one of them being a guy about 1/3 larger than the size his seat could hold. That 1/3 was in my seat instead, and pressed tightly up against me, because I am large enough that I filled 100% of what my seat could hold. There's no extra space for the guy next to me to fill. On top of that, he was wearing a very thick sweater, which meant that I was basically wearing that sweater, and it was hot. I was sweating like a dog the whole flight through with my arms pressed to my side, unable to sit comfortably, and barely even able to breathe comfortably.
I was miserable through that entire ten hour period, and landing in Frankfurt felt like a release from the prison's solitary confinement. Of course, now I was in a foreign country. My phone didn't work anymore. I got on the wifi in the airport and checked my flight on the United app. It told me I needed to go to gate A2, which is what my boarding pass that I'd downloaded before leaving Houston said. I walked all the way there, but the board above the gate said that flight was going to Helsinki.
I didn't know what to do, so I hoped for the best, walked up to a guy behind a counter, and said, "Sprechen sie Englisch?"
"Of course. Can I help you?" the man said in return. I thought it might work this way. Everyone told me that it was easy to find people in Europe who speak English as a second language, but I had no proof of my own until now.
"Can you tell me where my gate is?" I asked, and pulled up my boarding pass on my phone. At that moment, I noticed that it had updated. The gate didn't say A2 anymore. It said A26. "Oh..." I muttered, "that just changed."
The guy dutifully went through the motions of scanning my QR code and telling me that my flight was boarding out of A26, and I thanked him and went my way. I tried to say it in German, but found myself saying, "Bitterschön" instead of "Dankeschön." My single semester of college German in 1993 did me no good.
It was a long walk to go from A2 to A26, but I got there in plenty of time for my next flight. This time it was less awful. The folks next to me weren't taking all of my space, so I wasn't crushed and sweaty when I made it to the Milano Linate airport.
From there, I was only just over halfway there. I still had to go to a different city called Piacenza. Now it was time to downshift to ground transportation. I had to figure out how to get there using trains, buses, and taxis. My wife set me up with a few apps that dealt with those things. I already had a passage paid for to get me to Piacenza. I just had to figure out where to board.
The first level was a bus from the airport to Milano Centrale train station. I followed the signs through the airport, found where buses left from, and took a seat to wait for the bus I had a ticket for (which was not for an hour. We were being careful when buying tickets to make sure I would be able to make it, but I easily could have caught the bus that left an hour earlier than the one I had paid for). While I waited, I tried to figure out the eSim card thing I had paid for to get internet on my phone while in Italy. I wasn't doing it right, though, because it wasn't working.
The bus that pulled into the slot was not labeled with the company name my ticket had on it. Was it the right bus? Crap! Was I in the wrong place? It said it was going to Milano Centrale, and there weren't any others around that said that. I figured I would have to just buck up and ask, despite my lack of Italian.
I approached the guy taking tickets, showed him mine, and asked if I was in the right place. Turns out I was. He scanned my ticket and said, "Prego." I took a seat inside and waited to pull away. Italy has a surprisingly small number of stoplights. I think I only saw a couple the entire time I was there. Every intersection was a roundabout, and these MFers were freakin' cavalier about the way they drove through them too. I don't know how there aren't constant traffic accidents in those things. From what I understand, there are more accidents in roundabouts than there are at stoplights, but the accidents themselves are less severe because the cars involved aren't coming from opposite directions...so, there's tradeoffs, I guess.
The bus pulled in and offloaded us at the train station. Some kid came up to me as I was trying to exit and said, "Ciao," and then proceeded to spout a bunch of Italian that was Greek to me. I had to shrug my shoulders and say, "Sorry, but I don't know what the heck you're saying." He shrugged too, and went in search of someone with actual knowledge of this place to question, and I walked into the train station.
It was surprisingly nice. I could tell that it had been built in a time when people still cared about things like this being pretty instead of just generic and bland like most airports are. Can you imagine if an airport looked like this? I went to Grand Central Station in New York when I visited there too, although in that case it was just to see it not to use it for its train services, and Milano Centrale was built in the same vain as that place.
Milano Centrale was even nicer by far than that, in my opinion. Grand Central Station was big and imposing, but less opulent in comparison.
There are different schools of thought. Some find that clean lines are better, but in my opinion, the statues, scrollwork, chandeliers, arches, and skylights are so much more impressive than clean lines might be.
In the station, again, I had to figure out how another form of transportation worked. There was a big board on the wall with train numbers, destinations, and platform numbers on it. Looking in my app at the ticket I'd already downloaded I figured out where my train was on the list, but it hadn't arrived yet, and would have no platform until it did (again, being cautious about the possibility of missing a connection left me with plenty of time to wait). I watched for a seat on the few benches available, jumped into one when I got the chance, and waited for my platform to appear on the big board.
About a half hour later, my train platform appeared, and I headed over to board.
There were assigned seats, and it took me a minute, as well as another question to an employee who happily spoke enough English to help me out, for me to figure out where the train car numbers were displayed so I could get on the right one.

Eventually, I was all boarded and ready to go. At this point, I was totally exhausted. I left for Europe at 6:00 PM the day before. It was 6:00 PM in Italy now...which meant it was about 11:00 AM in Houston, so that's what my body was feeling. I had slept very little on the overnight plane ride to Frankfurt...maybe a couple of hours tops...so I was really dragging. The clack-clack-clack of the train was the perfect thing to put me to sleep...except I couldn't let it do that. The train I was on would pass through Piacenza, my ultimate destination, but that wasn't the end of the line. That was just one stop along the way to Bologna. If I slept through my stop, I might find myself hundreds of miles from where I was supposed to be, so I doggedly fought sleep to get there.
I was worried as hell about what I would find there. My phone wasn't working. My wife had set me up with an app that was supposed to be good for taxis, but while on the wifi in the Milan airport, I had discovered that Piacenza, Italy was not one of the territories that it serviced. Of course, even if it had, I was getting no service on my phone, so I wouldn't be able to order up a taxi if it did work. I had no idea what Piacenza or its train station was like. Would there be taxis there? It was my final leg of the journey, but would I be able to fulfill it? I sure hoped so, because I couldn't call for help if there weren't any taxis.
When the stop arrived, I was sick to death with worry. I got off the train, walked under the tracks to the station, went out into the parking lot and, hallelujah, there was a line of taxis waiting for someone like me. The city was at least big enough for that. I hired a driver, and got a ride to the Best Western Park Hotel.
Now, here's where it broke down. I couldn't contact my wife. We hadn't worked anything out with the hotel. When I came in the door, I went to the front desk and told the guy I was here to meet my wife. He called her room. She didn't answer. She, of course, was doing something. She was out for dinner with the people she was working with. So, I said, "I guess I'll just wait for her."
I sat down in the lobby, put on my audiobook, and desperately struggled to stay awake even longer so that I didn't miss her when she walked in. I could just imagine me falling asleep, and her walking right past me without noticing I was there, and heading to her room for the night. I sat there for about an hour and a half before she finally managed to save me.
She had been worried sick about me, because she hadn't heard any updates from me all day. Once I left the wifi from the airport in Milan, my phone was just a brick. She didn't know if I'd made it at all. She couldn't call with her phone either, but she did manage to borrow the phone of one of her co-workers and call the hotel desk. She told them that I would be coming and to let me into her room.
The guy knew exactly who she was talking about, told her he would take care of it, and came to give me a key to the room. I was so glad. I couldn't stay awake any longer. I thanked him, and stumbled up to our room, fell onto the bed, and passed out for about ten hours.
I'd made it. In the morning, it would be time to see what I could do here.