We arrived home safe and sound on Tuesday night.

On Monday, as we had to catch the bus from Jen’s house to the train station, I made poor Adrian leave about five hours early to ensure that we wouldn’t be stuck in some sort of horrendous Roman traffic jam. Roma Termini was full of people – queueing, waiting, sleeping, and complaining. All tickets had been sold out for the rest of the week:

No seats were available in the train station, so we wedged ourselves and our luggage against a wall and waited for the minutes to tick past. We caught the train from Rome to Milan slowly north without incidence, and we were able to check into our hotel around 11:30pm. Our next train was set to depart at 7:10am. Adrian begged me not to make him get to the station five hours early again, and I agreed. I set both phones on to wake us up at 6:00am, and we even had time to grab a panini at the station before boarding our train to Zurich.

This was my favourite part of the route – what a difference between Italy and Switzerland, suddenly we were surrounded by snowy peaks, brightly washed houses, and crystal lakes. At lunch time we were in Zurich, grabbed some pizza and giant pretzels, then found our next train. I was so happy to finally see some sign of our progress:

As all the high-speed trains had been booked out, we had the rare chance of catching the INT90 from beginning to end, stopping at:

Zurich (Switzerland)
Baden (Switzerland)
Brugg (Switzerland)
Frick (Switzerland)
Stein-S (Switzerland)
Rheinfelden (Switzerland)
Basel (Switzerland)
St Louis Haut Rhin (France)
Mulhouse (France)
Colmar (France)
Selestat (France)
Strasbourg (France)
Metz (France)
Thionville (France)
Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
Arlon (Belgium)
Libramont (Belgium)
Jemelle (Belgium)
Marloie (Belgium)
Namur (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Luxembourg (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Schuman (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Nord (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Central (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Midi (Belgium)

At one stage, I thought that the train announcer said “Nous n’arrivons jamais.” (We are never arriving), but quickly realised he was saying “Nous arrivons Jemelle (We are arriving in Jemelle), which was much better news. Later, when we first heard “Dames en heren” (Ladies and Gentlemen), all the Belgians cheered, because Flemish announcements meant that we were getting very close to home.

At 8pm that evening, we got off the train at the very last stop, pointed the way to the Eurostar for some stranded Brits, and then a short walk later were finally home with our kittens.

Our final port of call in Italy is Rome, where we have been staying with my friend Jenny in her lovely apartment near the Australian Embassy. Adrian woke me up on Friday and announced “Kitten day tomorrow!”. We have enjoyed our trip, but we were glad that we had a flight back to Brussels on Saturday. We had heard something about the volcano, but we checked with Ryanair and everything looked okay. Then, at 6:38pm on Friday, Ryanair send me a text that said “URGENT – Your Ryanair flight has been cancelled – please visit www.ryanair.com for free rebooking/refund”. This was the only form of communication – no email with further information. Panic begins to set in.

We go to the website, and it tells us that we cannot rebook online because we have already completed the online check-in procedure. We phone the call centre, but it is overloaded and we cannot connect. The call centre closes at 7pm GMT. We don’t know what to do. Do we book another ticket for Tuesday? Should we go with Ryanair or Brussels Airlines? Should we hire a car and drive, or catch a train all the way back to Brussels? We decide to see what the news is in the morning, and then go into town to assess the situation first-hand.

On Saturday morning, Adrian reads that the last time a volcano like Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 1821, it lasted for more than two years. We decide that we will not try to fly back to Brussels. We catch bus 38 to the train station, and try to find the end of the line for the international train tickets. This is the line:

While Adrian lines up, Lina helps me find the car hire booths. Every single company is completely out of cars. The people at the desks are just shaking their heads at anyone who approaches. One guy looks smug as he waves a reservation form. I bet he’s glad he booked ahead.

We wait in the line for 2.5 hours. The line is peppered with air passengers who flew into Rome and then had their connecting flights cancelled. The line for baggage storage is also daunting. Periodically, a staff member with a megaphone announces discouraging news like “No tickets to Paris until Wednesday”, and “There is an extra train to Madrid at 2pm. We can not issue reservations for this train. You will have to buy your tickets on the train”. We imagine the stampede that will happen that afternoon for those seats. Half of the ticket counters are closed, and there are only five staff members working. Each reservation takes at least 15 minutes to process. Often the ticket agents have to pull out rail maps of Europe to find an available route.

Finally, we reach the head of the line. I ask the ticket guy for tickets for the first train to Brussels. He shakes his head, “No trains left for today or tomorrow”, and seems to wave us away, like that’s that. “How about for the day after that?”, I ask. He looks very surprised, and I wonder if he has even looked up to see the line in front of him. A colleague comes and asks him what kind of sandwich he wants for lunch, and they discuss that for a while. However, he manages to find us train tickets from Rome-Milan, then Milan-Zurich-Basel-Strasbourg-Luxembourg-Brussels. We leave on Monday 19th April at 4:36pm and arrive on Tuesday 20th April at 19:51. We tell him that we’ll take it. For the two of us, the tickets are a total of 418.40 euro, plus 81 euro for a hotel for our 8 hour stopover in Milan.

We feel so lucky that we have tickets. As we returned home in a mass of people, I clutched my handbag fiercely, terrified that it would be stolen and remove our one chance at getting home. I still stroke the tickets occasionally, reassuring myself that we do have an escape from this mess. Our friend Lina is currently waiting at Rome airport, waiting to see if her flight to Australia via Malaysia will go ahead. In the meantime, we are holed up at Jenny’s apartment, doing our washing and hoping that we can return to our lives on Wednesday.

From Trieste we caught the train to Venice. We stepped out of the station, and there in front of us was the Grand Canal. With only 60,000 locals, and 10,000,000 visitors each year, this city is a caricature of its old self. Still, as most tourists only visit for a few hours, we found some relative solitude at the edges of the days, the winding streets and masks in the windows reminding me of Labyrinth.

Our guide Maria took us on the Hidden Venice Walking Tour. With a brown cape swung around her shoulders, speaking of trading with foreign lands, she reminded me of a Venetian from the 1400’s. She showed us the church porch that protected Europe’s first bankers, and the nearby street to house Europe’s first insurance agent, gambling on those treacherous trips across the Mediterranean. We saw some of Europe’s first public clocks, divided into 24 hours, where XXIIII meant sunset.

We took a ferry across to Murano. Glass has been boiled, twisted, and sculpted on this island for over 800 years. We saw some extraordinary work in the Museo del Vetro, exceptional colours and inserts, the light shining through translucent pieces that had been carefully crafted centuries ago. It took us a while, but we finally found a Fornace that was offering demonstrations. As we were sitting down, the man twirled some glowing magma on a stick. With some pliers in his other hand, he pulled and snipped the liquid, encouraging a horse’s head to emerge. Four more strategic tugs created the legs, and then a few more swift movements produced the tail and severed the animal from its creator. The whole process was over in a few seconds. To his right, we noticed a mountain of pale blue horses, discarded from previous demonstrations, perhaps waiting to be melted and reborn the next day. I rescued one of the horses from the showroom, having seen the birth of his cousin.

We finished up with a late lunch – the food a little better than the terrible fare available on the main island, then accidentally caught the Vaporetto going the wrong direction, circumnavigating the picturesque island before finally arriving back at our hotel.

We are in Italy for two weeks with our friend Lina, and started our sojourn with a daytrip to Slovenia. We booked a day tour on the web a while back, and we were waiting for our tour bus to turn up outside our hotel in Trieste, when a guy in a black Mercedes pulls up. He has my name written on a piece of paper, but the only word in English he knows is “okay”, and the only word I know in Italian is “grazie”, so we are unable to communicate further. We shrug and hop inside the car, and off he zooms. We pass the border crossing between Italy and Slovenia, now only indicated by a few blue signs on the side of the road. Our driver speeds us down the deserted highway, and we end up at the Postojnska Jama caves by 9 AM.

The tour doesn’t start until 10, so we spend an hour walking past the river and poking through the souvenir stores. They have some beautiful crystals and fossils, but the ones that we like don’t look like they would be easy to fit into a suitcase. Soon it is time for the tour to begin. They load us onto the world’s first underground railway, and it zooms off like a roller-coaster. Suddenly we are inside enormous limestone caves, ducking our heads to avoid the stalactites that come whizzing past at 20 km/hour.

We end up in a grand cave, filled with sparking and dripping columns. Slender stalactites reach down from the ceiling, and squat stalagmites inch form thick turrets from the ground. The stalagmites grow faster than the stalactites, at a speedy rate of one centimetre every hundred years.  Out guide then takes on a guided walking tour for the next two kilometres, over the Russian ridge originally build by Russian prisoners of war, though the spaghetti room with a ceiling cascading with fine noodle-like appendages, the white room dominated by pure calcium carbonate structures, the red room tinted with iron oxide, and then we get to meet a curious proteus, the blind cave-swelling amphibian. Off again for another train trip through the caves, this time past black manganese-tinted towers, and then over the underground river that first carved out these caves eons ago.

We pick up some interesting looking blueberry honey, cinnamon honey, and honey liquor from a stall outside, and then find our driver who is waiting for us, smoking a cigar and reading the paper. In less than an hour, we are back in Trieste, ready for a delicious lunch of gnocchi and pizza.