Train ride to the sun

Miles and I woke up a little earlier and it was – you guessed it...- raining.
The advantage of waking up early on a camping in the rain is that it is void of people on the collective bathroom. A luxury you are not always spoiled with.

Lars-Inge woke up just a while later and we soon had all our stuff packed and left to find the station VERY well ahead of time. Breakfast was a sandwich of bread and cheese left over from the day before and we figured we would get to find some good and inexpensive place to do a brunch thing. But we didn't. We DID find the station though (several hours ahead, which is also an example of bad planning) AND managed to get access to a WiFi hot spot for five Euros per hour, which was a bit on the pricy side but Miles could do some mails to Pat and I could download two days of web logs together with pictures that I prepared in the tent at the camping. There was no electricity there but my mystical 6 volt / 12 volt power pack we built earlier, once again did its trick. Downloading was a breeze and we even got images in there.

The images is a thing for itself, by the way. The camera insists in talking to some rather stupid software that is intended to make your own digital photo albums. You have to select images, transfer them, store them and then select them one by one to extract them so that they are possible to publish. The whole process needs to be run through THREE different programs, which is a pain in the hind quarters. Having done the blog, some mail and no food, we found out that it was a) possible to check in the bikes for the car train and b) the loading area was not where we THOUGHT it would be. That kept us busy for a while though, shifting the bikes from the car loading area to the separate bike loading area, but then it all calmed down again. We hung out at the station by the bikes for a few hours, talking to passers by and other people who travelled with motorcycles and had a rather good time of it. Still no food though.

Loading the bikes on the train was pretty scary. You had to ride on board at the aft of the train, wearing your helmet since it was that low. The crew strapped the machines down and you got off to the side and walked the length of the train to the VERY small cabin. It consists of a wash basin the size of a teacup in its own cabinet, three seats on the lowest bunk and then two more bunks ahead. The middle of which is folded flat against the wall right now. It will be interesting to see how procedures goes when it comes to making the beds. It is cramped, minatyrized but clean and tidy.

Miles and Lars-Inge are out scouting the train so I am taking the opportunity to be a good boy and do some work. Tomorrow is Italy. That's really something!