After a week in Rome, I was ready to head to Athens. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Rome, but it was time to move on. I knew the trip was going to be complicated. I had to get a ticket to Bari, arrive in Bari and take a bus from the train station to the port, get a ferry ticket to Patras, then arrive in Patras and get a train ticket to Athens. Still, with all of my travel experience, I thought that I would get through without too much trouble. I was wrong.
The first time I tried to make the trip, yes, I said the “first time,” I was unsuccessful. It appears that between Rome and Bari, I was supposed to get off the train in Casserta, hop on a bus to Foggia, and then hop on another train to Bari. Do you know who told me this? Nobody. My ticket didn’t provide any clues, telling me that I was going straight from Rome to Bari. I realized it only when I found my way back on the road to Rome. It was already a tight schedule, so I knew there was no way that I was going to make it to Bari in time after this fubar, so I called the hotel that I had stayed at in Rome to see if it had a room for another night. Fortunately, it did, so I ended up spending another night in Rome.
The next day, I tried again. When I got the reservation for the train, the person at the ticket booth told me that I would need to get off the train in Casserta and take a bus to Foggia. Thanks. Where were you yesterday? On the train, when the conductor punched my ticket, she told me that I would need to get off the train in Casserta and take a bus to Foggia. Have you caught on to the pattern yet?
Fine. This time, I’m just following the crowd. I get off the train in Casserta, hop on a bus from Casserta to Foggia and then hop on another train from Foggia to Bari. Now, because I tend to look things up ahead of time. I knew that the train station in Bari isn’t all that close to the port in Bari and I needed to find a Bus #20 or lug all my stuff about a mile in an undetermined direction. Fortunately, as soon as I stepped out of the train station, I saw a #20 bus and chased it down. Arriving at the port, I picked up a ferry ticket to Patras, Greece with about an hour-and-a-half to kill.
Now, if you read my post about the ferry from Egypt to Jordan, you realize why I boarded the ferry with great trepidation. I was expecting bad, bad things. I knew that I was guaranteed an “airline-style” seat, so I wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor unless I wanted to, but I knew nothing else. The trip was to take eighteen-and-a-half hours, with a stop in another port first, just south of the Albanian border.
What I found on the ferry was a very pleasant surprise. There was plenty of room to store my luggage in the main cabin with the airline seats. That room had a large HD television, and played back-to-back soccer matches (Europa League) from around 7 to 11:30. The ferry had a nice restaurant (I had a Greek salad), the bathrooms were clean, and there was even wifi on the ferry which wasn’t free, but was very inexpensive. Even better, many of the airline seats weren’t taken up, so there was room to pull up the arms of the seats and spread out and go to sleep. As an added bonus, we picked up an hour by switching time zones, so the trip was only seventeen-and-a-half hours. The one problem was that when we made the first stop at 4:30 am, it was loud and bright as most of the passengers exited the ferry, so I was awakened way too early, but overall, it was the best ferry trip I’ve ever taken.
Arriving in Patras, again having looked ahead, I knew that the train station was very close to the port. I found it with little trouble after being pointed in the right direction. I met a girl from T’ronto (her pronunciation) who was on the ferry and also heading to Athens. We had some time to kill so, after getting our tickets to Athens, we walked into Patras and grabbed some lunch. When the train came, we hopped on. It was the smallest, tightest-fitting train I have ever been on. I mean, it was smaller than your average subway car. We found seats, though, and headed towards Athens.
Well, not all of the way to Athens. Somewhere an hour or so out of Patras, the train pulled over and everybody got off. I wasn’t about to get caught on another train heading in the wrong direction, so I followed everybody. Everyone else got on a bus, so I got on the bus. The bus made the next few scheduled train stops and stopped in Kiato. In Kiato, it was time to hop on another train. This train actually looked like a subway car. In fact, I would have thought that I was on the subway except that we were still an hour outside of Athens. It was difficult trying to figure out where we were or whether we were on time, so we just hopped off the train at the time we where scheduled to arrive in Athens. Fortunately, by that time, we were in Athens. It had already started getting dark, and I had a decent idea where my hotel was located, so I took off and headed in that direction, finding the spot with little problem.
I guess the train-bus-train-bus-ferry-train-bus-train trip from Rome to Athens all worked out in the end.
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