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.