In the land of Dreams, even a blink can be a nightmare.

April 11, 2014 Country’s

Today we spent the day in Venice. It was a beautiful day so Ben again braved shorts and this time didn’t regret it.

 As I’m sure it is every day, Venice was full of tourists and groups of teenagers being loud and annoying (picture your average teenager and a group of their peers). We didn’t really have a plan for what we wanted to see, so we just picked up a map (for 2 euro, apparently free maps don’t exist in Europe’s Greatest Tourist Trap) and went a’wandering. 

We wound our way through the little streets and alleys and checked out most of the major churches and attractions on the map.

For lunch we enjoyed a little quiet time on a patio overlooking the water and sipped wine and ate delicious pasta. 

After our little break we continued on wandering and ended up near where the cruise ships dock, which is also adjacent to the dock where all the goods come and go from Venice. Along the fence we saw a super random giant hand holding a toy tank. 

After making our way back to a more touristy area, we enjoyed some super tasty gelato before heading back to our car.

We were parked in a parking garage and I had left the parking ticket in the car, but we had noticed that there were cashiers on the main level near the elevators. We didn’t have our ticket with us so we figured we should be able to pay at the exit gate. After winding our way all the way down from the 10^th level and getting in line for the exit gate, we could see that there was no attendant and no way to pay at the gate. Luckily there was no one behind us so we backed up and Ben ran up a level to pay. Other tourists were not so smart. 

There were 2 gates in each lane so once you pull up to the machine that takes your paid ticket, a gate closes behind your car and you are blocked in. Then the only way to pay is to leave your car there between the gates and run through the garage, passed all the super pissed off Italians who are honking like crazy, up one level to pay and then back passed the even longer line of pissed off Italians and back to your car. At one point both lanes out were blocked by people who hadn’t paid. Luckily we were not in one of those cars.

Once out of Venice we decided that we should probably put some gas in the car since we were getting close to fumes. We stopped at a gas station before getting on the freeway and Ben filled up the car and we headed back towards Padova, which is where we are staying. A couple kms down the road the car started making a weird clicking noise and lost power, so we pulled over into an “SOS” pullout that they have all over the place in Italian freeways. 

Turns out we put some Italian version of diesel in the car instead of unleaded (to be fair, there were 4 different options, one of which clearly said “diesel” and that is NOT the one we filled the car with (by “we” I mean Ben)). Anyways, Ben was understandably super upset and I was strangely calm, likely because he was so upset and there was nothing to do at that point to change the situation. So at these “SOS” pullouts there is a call box with 2 buttons on it, one for ambulance and one for service. It just says to push the button and when the light is flashing then someone will be sent out to you. But Ben said he couldn’t tell if the light was flashing or not so he just pressed the button a bunch of times. And so we sat trying to figure out our next step. 

We attempted to call Hertz because they have emergency contact numbers for every country they operate in, but we couldn’t seem to call out on Ben’s cell phone (I don’t know if it was an issue of the country code or what, either way super frustrating).

We were about 500m from a turnoff and at every turnoff there is a toll booth, so Ben walked up there to see if he could get help while I stayed with the car in case our “SOS” had actually been heard. About 30 minutes later Ben came back and said that he had to run across 6 lanes of traffic to get to a guy at the toll booth who didn’t speak any English. Ben managed to let the guy know our car was broken down and the guy called someone to come out and help us. It was probably only another 30 minutes after Ben got back that a tow truck arrived, loaded up our car, and took us to a shop. 

At the shop they told us that they couldn’t work on the car until tomorrow morning but it should be ready at 11am. Of course we said that was fine, and left our poor little Opal at the shop to be taken care of by people who know what kind of fuel to put in a car (remember we picked up the car with a full tank of gas and only 9kms on it, this was only the poor little car’s second tank of gas L).

The guys at the shop were nice enough to drive us to the train station so we could get back to Padova. So we bought our train tickets back and then there we are like a couple of fools trying to figure out what platform the train was on and what time it left. After a couple of minutes staring back and forth at our tickets and at the board with all the trains and not getting anywhere, we asked a train info guy and he says, “track 6, run! Run! It’s about to leave!!”. So we take off down the stairs and under the tracks to 6, up the stairs and the train is still there, I pull on the door handle, and the train lets off its breaks and rolls away. ARE YOU JOKING ME RIGHT NOW!

Obviously we are both pretty upset at this point. What to do, what to do….? So we look at the train schedule to see which train is leaving next and stopping in Padova. Turns out the train on track 7 is going that way, so instead of changing our ticket we just jumped on that train and hoped for the best. Everything was going fine until the ticket lady came around and I showed her our tickets. She was not impressed, mostly because we had purchased tickets for a little regional train and the train we jumped on was more of a city-hopper, so it was faster, nicer, and made less stops, therefore the tickets are more expensive. She just kept saying we can’t use the tickets and we have to pay more for this train, so I just kept saying what can we do, how can we pay? She finally just told us that Padova is the next stop (this particular trains first stop), wrote something on our tickets, and left. This is the one time I have been travelling where I hoped that she just assumed we were American.

We arrive at Padova station and according to Ben’s Europe GPS (which works without data and has been extremely accurate and useful so far), it’s only a 4 minute car ride so we decide to skip the taxi and just walk. Looking back, I don’t know why we made this decision, we had been walking all day and were obviously out of our minds due to all the traumatic experiences we had that day. In reality it probably only took us half an hour to get back, plus we had the foresight to stock up on some snacks, salad and a sandwich at the Spar at the train station, so at lease we had dinner when we got back to the hotel. The one thing we did forget to buy was a large bottle of wine to drown our sorrows in.