After typing this all up, I apologize but it got way longer than it seemed lol oops. I grabbed the wrong SD card for the pictures, I’ll get the correct one tomorrow.
So I was thinking about which crazy story to share that my wife and I have experienced in the years that we have been married. Some of the best ones were from when we were in Italy.
So towards the end of our trip there, I decided, unfortunately, that we would go from Siena to the northern region of Italy, near the lakes. We stayed in a very quaint town near Lago Maggiore called Cadrezzate. It looked nice on the pictures, had decent reviews but they left out some very important pieces of information. No one spoke English! Lol. My Italian towards the end of my time was actually pretty good! I could converse on pretty decent levels, much so that people were shocked we were Americans! We realized after a few hours there that this region is where Italians went to vacation, not Americans! Too late, we were booked there for 4 days!
One of the days we were up there, I decided that we are going to try and visit the big lake and ride this really fantastic gondola that takes you up the side of a beautiful mountain. All looked good on paper! So we go to the front desk and see how we can get over there. The guy tells us that you can hop on a train nearby and it will take you to the town you can grab the gondola from. We asked for some directions and off we went.
Mistake number one... we didn’t have a car. So being the adventurous couple we are, we decided it’s probably like a mile walk or so but we also happened to take a few screenshots of google maps on my phone when we were on WiFi. We set out walking and quickly realized that we had absolutely no flipping idea where the hell we were going, we were walking on the side of a pretty busy road that had no sidewalk and cars were going pretty fast! We walked through a bit of a neighborhood and saw the oldest guy you’ve ever seen mowing his lawn, I felt proud of the guy, that’s why he was still alive! So we finally found a street sign! We were in luck because the street sign just happened to also be in the small snippet picture on my phone of the directions. Hallelujah! So we found out where we were going and at last found the way to the train station. To get there, you have to walk past a garbage dump and the street that led to the train was literally like in a fucking horror movie. It was extremely full of trees, dark because of the tree coverage and next to a sketchy ass dump. At this point we were contemplating trying to just go back but we were this far already! We trudged along and I honestly grabbed the biggest stick I could find to have some sort of protection against the bastards in the Italian version of the “Hills Have Eyes” horror movie. We finally arrive at the “train station” and what do you know? It’s one of those stops that has to be requested, it’s a tiny ass hut with broken glass, missing a door and spiders literally everywhere. At this point my fiancée at the time was like “ok fuck this I’ve had enough!” We contemplated what we were going to do but we had enough food and water for a few more hours so we decided to wait to see when the train would come. I think it took about 60-90 minutes before it arrived and we finally hopped on the run down train from a Russian block of Eastern Europe. It was a piece of junk!
Our travel route somehow from the town over to some part of the train tracks lol
This story doesn’t end here but to keep it brief I’ll stop here. If you want me to continue let me know! There’s 2 more parts to it lol
That sounds like a great holiday adventure! So far anyway. You're lucky you were able to speak a little of the language I guess, and also lucky you didn't get jumped in these dodgy areas! I think you're going to need to do a post on it to be honest, maybe you can post in in the Haveyoubeenhere community and pin the location to pinmapple.
You have to do this because you've left me hanging with only one instalment of the great Italian gondola debacle.
!ENGAGE 25
ENGAGEtokens.Adapt and Overcome! Never to that extent, but that's how I travel "Let's see what happens next" mentatlity.
I think you need to post this story. It's just terrific and going to get better I'm thinking!
Hahah thanks, I think it looks like I’m going to have to post it!
When it was just my wife and I we lived by the seat of our pants often. With the little man we try not to do that since he can't go as long as we can.
This is a post in itself. Come on, Haveyoubeenhere?
Hahah yeah the post will be a lot better with the accompanying pictures! I’ll have to work on it, I need to find the SD card that has the pics. There’s two spots it could be and I just didn’t get to look yet.
I’ll have to load all kinds of pictures from Italy, we had such an amazing time and did so many things, both scary and fun lol