Marseille To Milan

Every now and again, I like to write about one of my trips because those are a big part of the fun/misery on these whirlwind trips, right? Right. So, on Thursday, I took off from Marseille, heading for Milan.

So, a few days before the trip, I got the reservations to go along with my Eurail pass. There’s no direct train from Marseille to Milan, so I had to break the trip into three legs. A mistake I made, that I won’t make again, is that I didn’t tell the ticket guy the exact legs that I wanted to take. As a result, he selected a train leaving at the crack of dawn, with dangerously short layovers and he demoted me to second class. (For Pisa and Roma, I underlined the trains and times I wanted and made sure they were in first class.) My trip was taking me from Marseille to Nice to Ventimiglia to Milan.

What was the result? Well, I got up at 4:45 am on Thursday, after my one-man bar crawl in Marseille the night before, and had to get ready to go to the train station. The train station in Marseille is on top of a hill. The walk to the train station is all uphill to the base of that hill. Although the trip was only about a half-kilometer, it was the longest half-kilometer I have ever walked at 5:30 in the morning. Nevermind; there was a McD’s at the station that was open that provided me with latte and free wifi, so all was good in the world. At least for a while.

I noticed on the board that my train was running about ten minutes late. That wouldn’t have been a big deal except that I only had a fourteen-minute layover in Nice. Well, if everything went right and I rushed, I would still be okay. Everything didn’t go right, though. By the time the train left Marseille, it was obvious that “ten-minutes” was wishful thinking. As we started hitting stop after stop, it was clear that we were running around thirty minutes late.

So how did this affect everything else? Well, if I missed my train in Ventimiglia, it meant that I was going to have to wait another four hours for the train to Milan and arrive at night, which I tend to avoid since I walk everywhere with all of my belongings, and usually have to depend on street signs that are difficult to see at night and in a foreign language, when they are present at all. As far as worst-case scenarios go, it’s not the end of the world, but it was still a fate that I wanted to avoid.

I could tell by our tardiness at every stop that I was not going to make my train from Nice to Ventimiglia in time. I had two hopes. One, my train in Nice could be late. This one was, why couldn’t the other? The other hope was that there was another train thirty minutes after the one I was supposed to be on in Nice. This hope goes like this: I had a 47-minute layover scheduled in Ventimiglia. If I got there thirty minutes late, I could still catch my train. The problem was that I didn’t know if there would be another train in Ventimiglia. According to my schedule trains from Nice to Ventimiglia run “1-2 times an hour” that time of day. Well, which is it? Every half hour or every hour? Every half hour and I may be okay. Every hour and I’m screwed with a four-hour wait in Ventmiglia.

When we arrived in Nice, I ran straight to the board. There was a train leaving for Ventmille (which I assumed was French for Ventimiglia) in twelve minutes. Luck!!! I caught that train and rode to Ventmiglia. En route, we traveled down some very beautiful coastlines in France, as well as a brief stop in Monaco, though that stop was underground with a definite lack of scenery.

When I arrived in Ventmiglia, I had about ten minutes to spare to catch my train to Milan, as scheduled, and I was fortunate to make it. That train had cabins instead of airplane-style seats, and I don’t like cabins. I spent the next few hours in a tiny room with five others that I couldn’t communicate with. There was nothing particularly unpleasant about it; I just didn’t enjoy it.

When I got to Milan, I realized that my walk to the hotel was going to take about thirty-minutes. There was nothing really I could do with respect to public transportation or anything to make the trip any shorter, so I sucked it up, picked up all my luggage and started walking. I found it easy enough. My troubles with the hotel will be identified in a future post.