Never as easy as you predict aka Joys of travelling.

It was supposed to be so easy and comfortable. But it never turns out this way.

Obviously something had to happen to my nice and straightforward trip to Munich on a night train from Amsterdam. Obviously. And it obviously did. The Germans decided to go on strike on the very day of my journey. It happens, I had to deal with multiple travel strikes in my life. So after checking my travel options, I’ve cycled to Leiden Centraal in hope that they would be able to help me rebook my travel. They weren’t. Leiden cannot deal with international travel at all. The lady at the service desk kindly sent me to Den Haag. It was just past 11am at this point.

So, with not much choice now, I’ve cycled back home, and no one has ever seen me cycling this fast on an empty stomach. Within less than 30 minutes I managed to: attempt to reach the NS International Customer Service 3 times (no response), pack myself for the week (although packing is a bit of an exaggeration, since it was pretty much just throwing random pieces of clothing, cosmetics and an extra pair of shoes into a suitcase) and unload the washing machine and hang all the wet clothes on a drying rack. I think it’s pretty impressive for 30 minutes.

Then I raced back to the station, with a suspiciously heavy suitcase tucked into my front basket, and caught the first available train to Den Haag. It was 12:02 when I got there.

Of course the ticket service place was crowded with people trying to sort out their journey, thankfully, thought by my entire Dutch experience of queuing, I did acquire a number ticket, which probably speeded things up a bit. The lady at this service desk made a funny face when I showed her my ticket. Presumably I wasn’t the first one enquiring into the German strike situation. After a series of data input operation and a call to someone more competent, I’ve finally got my rebooked ticket. Well, I didn’t actually get a new tickets, instead I got a beautiful blue sticker with a lot of German on it and some scribbles. I was a bit unsure how legitimate such a solution was, but decided to have faith in the competence of the service desk lady.

With my revised ticket in my hand, I caught the first possible train to Utrecht Centraal. Apparently this is the biggest and busiest station in the Netherlands and indeed there was a lot of people running around. With over two hours to spare, I had to organise snacks for the eight-hour journey and some lunch since at this point I could no longer ignore the rambling of my stomach. I’ve had some ready-made AH sushi, which I wouldn’t recommend. It was filling, but you’d probably be better off splashing out on some proper sushi. Not as if I had my choice being rather unkeen on leaving the station and potentially getting lost in Utrecht.

Finally, at 15:02 I boarded the ICE train which was supposed to take me to Dusseldorf. But it didn’t. Somewhere around the Dutch-German border we managed to hit a car. After over an hour of waiting we were assured that the driver was fine. As much as I appreciate the fact that the train I was on did not kill anyone, at that point I was already late for my next connection train and would appreciate some information about the length of the delay, but the only thing we were told was that ‘the waiting time is yet unknown’.

It turned out that our train was unfit for continuing the rest of the journey, so we managed to very slowly roll to Emmerich, which is a small German village in the middle of nowhere, and change trains. At 18:42 I made it to Duisburg. From there, another train (it turned out that the change was completely unnecessary, although this particular train seemed to be going much faster) to Dusseldorf.

At 19:27 I happily sat down on a train to Munich. Or so I thought. When the ticket controller came  round it turned out that I’m on a wrong coach. That part of the train only ran to Stuttgart. And no, it wasn’t possible to simply walked over, I had to wait until we get to Cologne and then get off the train and back on onto the next coach. To be honest I was pretty lucky that the man came over at this time and told me that I was in a wrong place, otherwise I would have ended up in Stuttgart, not knowing that I wouldn’t be going any further.

00:27, finally there. Without any surprises. At a certain point I honestly thought that I would not make it to Munich, I simply had enough of all these train problems. Hopefully when I’ll be getting back next week it won’t be so complicated. But you never know with me. I tend to attract weird chains of events. Just to keep me entertained at all times.