My kids (and my son’s girlfriend) and I recently came back from a trip to Italy. (I know, I still have a few posts to write to finish up about my trip to Bulgaria- coming soon.) It was a great trip, our favorite family trip ever, and probably my favorite place I’ve ever visited. But it started off in a way that could have been quite problematic.
Well, first off, after getting into a car accident on the way to the airport my previous trip and barely making it to the airport in time, I decided to leave to the airport extra early… which was a good thing. Because we ended up going to the wrong terminal, but it wasn’t a big deal because we had extra time.
Once we were at the right terminal and through security all is good… or so I thought.
Our flight to Rome was an evening one, and we would be getting to the Rome airport at 10 pm. Originally I thought that once we went through border control and got our bags, it would be too late to take public transportation, so I resigned myself to paying the high fee for two late-night 30-minute taxis from the airport to where we were staying (or one extra large taxi), in Rome itself. But then I was told there is good public transportation all through the night from the airport, so we’d be fine.
Right?
Well, maybe not so fine.
It turns out our flight was delayed. And not by ten minutes, but by over an hour. Which almost ended up stranding us in the airport… because it turns out… I’ll get to that in a second.
When we got to Rome, it was after 11, and by the time we went through security and got our bags, it was already close to midnight. I found a machine for buying tickets, and it showed just one more train until 5 am, at 12:15 am. So we rushed out of the airport trying to find the train station so we wouldn’t miss our train. We were incorrectly told that the last train of the day had already left, and that stressed me out despite having purchased tickets for the train, because when we arrived at the train station it looked completely abandoned and the ticket-reading machines didn’t work. Fortunately, there was a train there (abandoned-looking station or not), and we got on it. Once it took off, a ticket collector got on and we were able to pay that way.
Fortunately our flight wasn’t delayed too much and we made the last train with 15 minutes to spare. If we’d been delayed any more, we would have been in trouble and would have had to figure out taxis, which I was struggling with because taxis all seemed to be ordered via apps, and the apps wouldn’t let you enter how many people, so you couldn’t order more than one at a time.
If our flight had been delayed further and we’d been screwed over and missed the last train, at least we would have been able to use AirHelp to get compensation for a delayed flight, which would have helped offset the cost of the prohibitively expensive taxis we would have needed to take to get to our lodging that night.
I’m glad we didn’t have to go that route, and that once we arrived in Rome proper we were able to catch a middle-of-the-night bus to where we needed to go. Can you imagine, it was standing room only after 1 am?
All in all, I guess all’s well that ends well, but I definitely would have appreciated our flights not being delayed, and not needing to take the very last train of the night.
