In transit
This is not quite how I envisioned my arrival in Italy. I’m standing outside the train station in Riomaggiore, one of the five tiny towns in the Cinque Terre region, and rain is pouring down so intensely that I can hardly hear the train as it pulls away from the station, leaving me utterly alone, very wet, and entirely unsure of where I am and where I should be going. A torrent of water is rushing past my feet, my hair is plastered to my face, and by this point, my jeans feel like they’ve glued themselves uncomfortably to my legs. Every few moments the sky lights up spectacularly as a fork of lightening slices through the clouds, and as I haul my massive suitcase towards a narrow overhang protruding from the dark, closed ticket office, I’m beginning to think that I have spectacularly bad luck when it comes to travelling.
The day didn’t start out badly at all. It was one of those beautiful crisp, clear autumn mornings in Paris, and I had savoured my usual café crème and croissant from the comfort of a heated terrace table. I managed to heft my suitcase (which, thanks to several successful shopping sprees weighed almost as much as I did) down the the steep spiral stairs in the apartment building without killing myself, and the taxi that I had called for and requested in tentative French actually arrived on time and to the right building. With the exception of a small incident involving a slightly torn fifty-Euro note and a highly agitated driver convinced that I was attempting to cheat him out of his rightful wage, everything was going perfectly smoothly – too smoothly, as I soon discovered.
After spending a few mind-numbing but altogether uneventful hours roaming the airport, I boarded the flight from hell. And shortly thereafter, things started to go wrong. Very wrong. Somewhere between Paris and Pisa, clouds began gathering under the plane. A few minutes later, the turbulence began – at first it was nothing more than a few annoying bumps and the occasional larger bounce, but then it progressed into stomach-twisting dips, immense rattling lurches, and a highly discomfiting sideways shimmy that I have no desire to ever experience again. As the plane rattled its way towards Pisa, the intercom crackled to life with a decidedly grim announcement: due to extreme winds at the destination, we would be circling over the airport for at least half an hour until the conditions were deemed safe for landing. After what seemed like eternity, the plane finally began a descent that felt more like a sick and twisted interpretation of a carnival ride than any flight ever should. And then it happened. Only seconds before the wheels should have hit the runway, the engines roared and the plane jerked sharply upwards. At the same time, a tense announcement advised passengers to consult their emergency procedures card, which caused the man sitting next to me to squeeze his eyes shut and blindly grab my arm in a circulation-limiting death grip.
I’ve had the misfortune of experiencing the terror that is the aborted landing two times previously – once when arriving on Kauai, once in Seattle, and both times in windstorms, which I’m sure proves that I have some kind of magnetic force that attracts bad weather – but this time’s emergency procedure’s announcement was a unique and unwelcome addition designed to add a whole new layer of panic to the experience. The plane did eventually end up making it onto the ground, but not before my seat mate’s sharp fingernails had left a series of painful and potentially permanent indentations in my arm.
After I extracted myself and my suitcase from the Pisa airport, there was a seemingly endless series of trains and train stations to be tackled. Each train station involved a period of intense confusion while attempting to decipher the timetables and then a period of intense pain while yanking the suitcase up and down flight after flight of steep, wet stairs while searching for the right platform; each train involved inordinate amounts of worry over the possibility that I might miss my stop entirely and end up at the wrong end of the country.
The train finally deposited the much-loathed suitcase and I in a very dark, very rainy Riomaggiore, leaving me to figure out all the complexities of dialling international numbers on my phone while praying that I wouldn’t be killed by a malicious bolt of lightening. Fifteen very cold minutes later, a tiny Italian woman holding a massive umbrella appeared out of a curtain of rain to lead me through a series of dark, wet streets and up twisting stone staircases until we reached our destination, a little guesthouse perched on what appeared to be the edge of a cliff. And rather than venturing into the town to seek out a late-night glass of wine and some much-needed food, I did what any tired, waterlogged traveller would do in this situation: shoved my suitcase into a corner, collapsed onto the bed, and instantly fell asleep.
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