Monday - Winding Down.

Wow, my last day in Italy is already here. I wish I could add on some fantastic, last-minute adventure, but today was fairly quiet. The plan was to go back to Vernazza, since I didn't have time to see much of anything yesterday, except the long flight of stairs that hurt every muscle in my butt on the climb down from town.

I took the boat over in the morning and wandered around for a while. The harbor is great for both boat and people watching, but the light drizzle that I was doing a pretty good job of ignoring turned into outright rain, and I didn't have my umbrella with me. This tends to make beachy tourist towns lose some of their charm, so I headed back to Monterosso after lunch, thinking I would catch an earlier train to Milan.

NO SUCH LUCK. All the trains were sold out, so after collecting my luggage from the hotel, I ended up with several hours to kill waiting for a 5:30 train. Luckily, the train stazione is right on the beach, along with several bars and cafes, so I happily passed the time with a couple of glasses of wine and a book.

Sidebar here... once when I first moved to DC and had gone up to Baltimore to meet my friend Karen who was there overnight for her work, I accidentally got on the wrong train to come home and ended up in Wilmington instead of DC. Ever since then, I'm a little freaky about worrying whether or not I'm on the right train...

But here in Italy, it's been pretty easy so far, and I'm in vacation mind-mode, so I didn't really look at what the stops along the way would be, and I didn't have a map with me. Just get on the train with the sign to Milano and get off once I'm there, how hard can that be? I thought the train ride was about three hours long, but my ticket did not have an arrival time. So three hours later, I'm getting a little nervous because I see countryside, not city out of the window. I get more nervous as the next few stops remain pretty rural. But I'm too embarrassed to ask THREE HOURS IN if I'm on the wrong train! What am I going to do if I'm on a train to Venice or something? I'll just wait until the next decent-size town and get off, and hope like hell that I can somehow make it to Milan for the flight home tomorrow.

Eventually, I hear the Italian woman in the next row talking on her cell phone and made out "going to Milano" so I relaxed a bit, although true relief didn't come until I saw the first city, Turns out that Milan was three hours and 55 minutes away, and of course I was on the correct train.

I'm just weird, that's all.