ammogirl

oh my god you guys, seriously about everything that could go wrong on a day of travel…went wrong. Although in the end the girls and I did make it to Innsbruck, it was tough. My alarm didn’t go off and then we had no hot water. What a fantastic way to start the day, right? So I sponge bathed, ponied my hair, and sucked it up. The first leg of our trip, Kaiserslautern to Mannheim went really well–if you don’t count the fact that it was a commuter train and we had non-commuter luggage. Not a lot of storage space in those ol’ commuter trains. Plus, cranky people. Who really don’t like you to put your suitcase anywhere by the area near, far, or anywhere in-between them. Anyway, we made it the hour to Mannheim without any major incident, and that’s when things all went to hell.

Our next train, Mannheim to Munich, arrived 20 minutes late, which sort of didn’t quite work out, considering we only had a 14 minute connection between Munich and Innsbruck. When I realized we weren’t going to make the next train, I spoke with the conductor, and he was apologetically affirmative on the fact that yes, we were screwed. But that we could make the next connection that arrived two hours later than we planned.

I will admit that this is where I started to have the one and only panic attack of the entire day. I had no way to communicate with John, and he was expecting us in at 3:20pm, and now we wouldn’t be arriving until at least 5:30. Taylor was asleep and Lindsey was reading and I stared out the window feeling my throat tighten and my breath coming really quick and my stomach wanting to heave and I thought “I will NOT have a panic attack I will NOT have a panic attack” over and over until the feeling went away and I was able to think sane thoughts, the paramount one being that regardless of when we arrived in Munich, my husband was going to be there to collect us. I took a deep breath and cleared my mind and voila! No more panic attack, a small victory considering A) who I am and B) the circumstances I was in.

By the time we got to Munich, all of our spirits were high and we had a fine time waiting the 1 1/2 hours until our next train, eating pizza and Banoffee ice cream from Haagen-Daaz. After a bit we got tired of lugging our bags around and headed to our platform to wait for our train, which couldn’t come in until the one that was already sitting there left. So we waited, and waited, and pretty soon it was five minutes before departure and that train that was in the way of ours still hadn’t left and I thought “…hmmm” and said to the girls “Um, I’ll be right back”. I found a train person and said, “this train right here, where is it going?” and the train person said, “Verona, via Innsbruck” and I thought “Holy shit, THIS IS OUR TRAIN!”

I ran back and grabbed the girls and the luggage and we literally were walking to our car as the train started moving and ohmygod we almost missed our train and we had been sitting in front of it for forty-five freaking minutes. I SHOULD NEVER TRAVEL ALONE.

However, two hours later we were in Innsbruck, and guess what, my husband was there to collect us.

The next morning our whole posse headed up the mountain. Different post, different day, the most gorgeous place and the best pictures ever (not posted yet, of course).

Today we are off to Munich, where we are meeting up with the rest of John’s family (the surprise of which he figured out after getting both his sister and his best friend drunk and interrogating them mercilessly) for the birthday weekend. Fabulous!

Oh, by the way, the whole train thing? Fucking awesome. I love trains!

Tschuss!!