Another Fine Mestre We Found Ourselves In

That's a view I had much of yesterday afternoon as we continued our grand tour of northern Italy. It is a tunnel beneath rail tracks that offers people the option of going left to Mestre or right to Marghera.

The problem with being in this tunnel is that we were trying to go straight ahead to Venice. The other problem was that we had already dragged all our luggage down there.

It's a relatively simple trip from Verona to Venice - no more than 75 minutes by train. Being the sort of people we are, though, Linda and I had decided the trip was lasting way too long and got off early.

Not that we really meant to do so. We thought we had arrived in Venice, but it really is the problem with not speaking the language - although I doubt that the Italians understood the muffled voices coming from the loudspeakers on the train.

I also have developed Kennedy's First Law of Train Travel: Just because most of the people in the car are getting off doesn't mean this is your stop.

So there we were, at first not even aware we were in the wrong city, but suspecting that there should be more choices than Mestre and Marghera. It didn't help that there were no elevators at the station, so we had to make a couple of trips down the steps to get all our bags down to the tunnel that we didn't want to be in in the first place.

To give full credit to Linda, she volunteered to go out of the tunnel and figure where we should go. It's full credit because at this moment, there was a terrible rainstorm. (The credit is somewhat diluted, though, by the fact that she realized that if I accompanied her we were likely to spend the night trying to get out of the tunnel.) Anyhow, I stayed, taking pictures of nothing until Linda returned to tell me that her new friend at the Avis outlet said we needed to lug the bags up the steps again and get on another train.

In fact Linda the Scout made so many extra trips up stairs and down corridors to see where we needed to go, that she can be said to have truly visited Mestre, whereas I never made it out of the tunnel. She assures me I didn't miss much.

I could fill in further details, such as the man half my size who saw me struggling and grabbed our biggest suitcases and jogged up to the top of the stairs with them for me. I could talk about holding up trains as we loaded and unloaded more luggage than the rest of the people in the cars combined. But I am getting tired of writing about how we don't cope well with local transportation. Trams, taxis, trains. No matter what it is, we seem to have a problem.

But in the end we always arrive, have a ready-made excuse to go to the bar asap, and sleep really, really well that night. We are leaving the room now to see Venice in the daytime. Pix with the next post.