The Longest (Travel) Day

Day One (Sunday) of my holiday-within-a-holiday was quite an adventure. The day before (Saturday) I elected to delay doing the things I needed to do until 630 AM (three hours before my train left Ostbahnhof). 

Packing. Laundry. Cleaning the apartment. Taking out the trash. Putting all my stuff out of the way for the next guests. Dishes. Plants. It was not an insignificant amount of work.

This was probably a mistake. But you know what was NOT a mistake? Going out the night before with my NEW Berlin friends and getting drunk on wine and beer until 2:30 AM. We had a lot of fun. I somehow managed to wake up on time, get most of my list done and make it to the train station early.

The plan was simple. Take a train to Cologne, meet up with Jan. Take another train via Mannheim to Basel. Then one to Ascona, Switzerland. A long day but whatever. These trains are comfortable. Some nice breaks at the stations. Traveling with a buddy. Semi-reliable WiFi.

I should mention that Deutsche Bahn (the German national railway) is VERY good at updating the arrival and departure times of their trains. You can go to their website, they email out notifications, and there are screens all over the trains. 

So the problems started earlier in the week when I couldn’t get a reservation all the way from Berlin to Cologne. I was able to get one to Hamm (2/3 of the way) BUT once I got to Hamm the train was split in two and the front (with me) was going to Dusseldorf. So I had to exit the train and get on the back part which was going to Cologne. 

That train was full so I had to sit on the floor. NBD. It was only supposed to be 75 minutes. 

So I was on the correct train. I messaged Jan and told him I was running late but still within tolerances. He was on the train in front of mine. We shared locations and he decided to ditch his slower (but on time) train and join me on my faster but slightly behind schedule one in Wuppertal.

This was a mistake. You see, Jan had to be at work at 8 am the next day. And we still had to make a couple of connections. And as far as we could tell, his original slow train made it to Cologne main station in time. My fast train, on the other hand… 

Wuppertal to Cologne is normally 29 minutes and we stood there by the doors (full train, remember) for over 90 minutes. They kept delaying our arrival time, BUT (just to give us hope) BOTH our connections also kept getting delayed. This went on until we were maybe 4 minutes from Cologne Main Station when our connection finally left for Mannheim.

So we were in Cologne and our options were:

1. Fly to Milan and then take a train to Ascona (expensive, annoying (air travel is trash))
2. Get on the next train, go as far as we can, get a hotel, continue in the morning and Jan misses his first lesson (he’s a dominatrix, or a school teacher – I can never remember.) This option is also expensive – hotels in Switzerland are like $300 (200 EUR) a night. Close to the same cost of two one-way flights.

We decided to fly so we took a quick train to Messe-Deutz to connect to the airport. Once there he realized that getting fired from his job was preferable to air travel so we went back to Cologne Main Station to look for a train to Mannheim. We found one that was leaving from Messe-Deutz. So we had to go BACK to Messe-Deutz.

There we grabbed a fast train to Mannheim where we had about a 30 minutes wait to catch a connection to Basel Switzerland. We loaded up on food during the break, which was nice – I hadn’t eaten in many hours. And after that we got on the train to Basel where we found ourselves in a very familiar situation.

Our train was VERY close to making our connection in Basel. This was the connection (we thought was out of reach) that would get us ALL THE WAY THERE. The problem was that the Swiss trains (always on time) don’t wait for the German ones (sometimes late). In fact if a German train is more than 15 minutes delayed, they don’t even let it across the border. This is to avoid introducing delays to the Swiss rail network. This connection is usually about 8 minutes. 

Now I’m not sure why, but this time they decided to keep the Swiss train for us. It was right across the arriving platform so we were able to walk right on – no delays from Canadian tourists getting injured running all through the station.

So by 00:22 AM we’d gotten as far as a train could take us. We took a bus for 30 minutes. Then we had to walk for ten minutes to Jan’s car. Then it was another 30 minutes drive and during this drive we saw exactly one person (who was not a motorist – I was getting some serious 28 Days Later vibes.) 

It was a long day but at the end of it I was very happy to fall asleep in what appeared to be the bed of a devout Christian child. The end.