Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Today’s adventures involved 2 train trips: Siena to Grosseto, a bit of a wait, then Grosseto to Civitavecchia, the port for Rome.

So, when does a paid for seat reservation on a train not equal a reserved seat on a train? When you get onto Coach 3 and look for your allocated seats of 9A and 10A only to find that 10A exists but 9A doesn’t! Fortunately, the train guy found us 2 other seats in the same coach that he said weren’t listed in the reservation system. Not ideal but at least we were in the same coach as each other and our luggage.

These were my last train trips in Italy and overall the experience has been great. Every train has been on time (I wasn’t expecting that), all trains had working air conditioning, and many were newer rolling stock, with only a couple perhaps made in the last 20 years (nothing earlier). Checking tickets (Eurail Pass in our case) has been hit and miss—I think our tickets were checked maybe twice on the first 5 sectors. They must be losing a lot of money because of this (someone on Facebook did mention that the fines for no ticket are VERY high in Italy [EU200 or more?] so it’s a big risk to travel without one). And train travel is certainly the best way to get from A to B in Italy. Even the regional trains are in good condition, though some stations were better than others (2 of the elevators to the platforms at Siena didn’t work the 6 times we used that station, twice with luggage). Luggage can be a bit of an issue—some carriages have luggage racks, but many don’t. Some train doors open flush to the platform, but many have several steep steps you have to negotiate quickly with luggage (typically the train is in the station for maybe 2 minutes and in that time you have to find your coach [1st or 2nd class and your reserved seat, if you have one] and get yourself and your luggage up the steps and onto the train). We found that one of the most useful pieces of travel kit we purchased were retractable luggage locks—we used them to tie our luggage to a railing or a bike or luggage rack. They removed the worry that if our luggage was out of sight, as it often was, that someone might take off with it, or that it would roll about the floor being a hazard to everyone.

We arrived in Civitavecchia (the port for Rome) late morning and spent a lazy afternoon wandering around the waterfront area, finding where we had to go to access the cruise terminal, having a bite to eat (we shared a carbonara and salad), then cooling off in the air conditioned apartment watching a couple of movies and doing laundry. A slow afternoon/evening to take the edge off all the recent travel and activity.

Tomorrow we start the next part of the adventure!

Locking our luggage to racks with retractable locks was a terrific idea, and they were well worth the purchase

Civitavecchia waterfront a cruise ship in the distance (not ours)