Today is yet another Big Travel Day! But first, we wake up in comfort.
We’ve only just arrived in Italy, but we already have a really long travel day again. We are about to take a seven-hour train ride to Sicily. How the heck do you take a train to an island?? You might guess taking a taxi here, which revs up to 100MPH and just attempts to jump it–I’m not saying that wouldn’t work, and I’m also not saying that it hasn’t been tried!!–but we are taking a calmer route.
Time for the first major stress of the trip!! We had booked our seven-hour train beforehand, online, so we don’t really have tickets, just an online receipt with a QR code. We arrive at the station with an hour to spare, but it is incredibly confusing. The station is part shopping mall, part local metro, part regional train service. And of course no pertinent info anywhere, and no one to ask.
We finally found a listing of train departures and we scanned it for the one leaving at 9:50. It doesn’t exist. There are no trains departing at 9:50 whatsoeverl
Thinking of a plan B, we search for a train listing including Catania as one of its stops! But that doesn’t exist either. We literally have nowhere to go.
And the clock continues to tick… By process of elimination, we guess that a certain 9:41 train might be close enough? But can we even find it, and how can we get in without tickets–all we have is some code on a website!
I was so stressed at this point I even forgot to take pics of all this. And if I was stressed, can you imagine Sam?!?!?
In Italy, for reasons unknown, it turns out they only post train platform numbers ten minutes before departure. Napoli is a big major-city station with at least 30 possible platforms: when we finally get our number, we’ll have to make an uninformed dash in mere moments.
Our phone QR codes somehow get us in past security, and we ran to our possible/maybe platform and joy: there is a train there! Our reservations are for coach number one. But the first number we can find is eight, so we drag ourselves and our luggage slowly down the platform: past car seven, then car six, all the way down to car two, when Sam suddenly spins around and begins marching back up the train, yelling something over her shoulder about “it’s not here!!”
Panic!! I have no idea what she’s doing, she’s already up three cars ahead talking with everyone in sight, while our few remaining minutes are ticking away—and is this even our train??
The Napoli station is so confusing: it’s also a major metro stop, and the trains are all run by different companies with offices at opposite ends of the enormous station.
But it turns out coach number one was there, just past car number two like you’d expect—it was even the correct train! So in the end we made it in time but only just. Sam had actual sweat dripping off of her at this point, I just wish I had thought to take pictures 😂
The seven-hour train ride was fun, but no wifi and no trolley… they did have vending machines in car six so we got a water & a bag of chips for four euros.
So how do you actually take a train to an island?? Well, you take the train to the end of the line; they break the train up into individual cars and roll them onto a specially-equipped ferry one by one, you cross the straights and then the train gets reassembled on the other side! Seems unlikely, right?
And now it’s time for a whole bunch of missing pictures!! We made it to Catania, dragged our month’s worth of luggage out with us, found the metro and figured out how to get to our AirBnB. The Catania Metro is great: there’s only one line, so it’s impossible to get lost!!!
Amazingly, we finally have made it to Catania, all the way from far-off and exotic Cincinnati! It’s been a hella voyage, now all we need is a second miracle: can the boys make it here too???
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