the train ride to barcelona

so we took a night train to barcelona and by the grace of sweet jeebus actually stepped off the train and got to barcelona. quite a funny story really...

for starters we damn near missed the train tuesday night. it departed at 10 pm, and we got the station about 5 minutes before racing with our packs and such to catch the train. we were trying to find our cabin in the railcar and someone was in our couchette.. i told them this was our area and they replied with something to the effect of, no this is ours, not yours, etc etc. you gotta understand the hallways on these trains are about 3 feet wide and with these packs on our backs what seems like a simple walk to the next car to find our couchette is quite hard... but we did. and it turns out when we got the next rail car, we were in fact right and that was our room. we ewnt all the way back and managed to get them out and put all of our shit in..

there were 6 bunked beds in a room half the size of my smallest dorm room in college.. thats right jeff, think less than half the size of 027 abbot. not cool, three beds bunked one on the other on each side of the room.. maybe total 6.5 feet deep by 7 feet wide, you get the point.

it got a bit more fun when the people riding with us in the car piled in along with nate and i. i would say we combined in our room for the oldest age in the entire place--- we were packing an 84 year old castillan spaniard with his lovely 83 year old wife who could barely move. then the french dude who was pretty cool im guessing rougly 45 years. the 60 year old snorer really threw us off balance though, she was the real piece of work.

i got settled writing a bit in my journal and reading some in my book. i conversed a bit with the 84 yr old guy who was cool, but his castillian spanish was really hard to understand and in trying to do so i must have looked like a complete idiot. the other lady, the 60 year old, i could speak with fine, but at this point there was nothing i wanted to say to her.

trying to sleep in this thing was hard enough, but as soon as about 2 am rolled around, the 60 yr old turned on her snorer and consistently roared through the entire evening. i am not talking about your standard snore here, it was like she had a motor to rattle this sound off. it was terrible.. i couldnt sleep at all. i would say i netted about 2 hours of sleep in increments of 20 minutes each for the 9 hour ride. goodness it was fun..

and for the final segment.. once i did finally fall asleep around 6 am i was pretty tired. nate had set his watch for 630 am so that we would awake when the train stopepd in barcelona. well, just as you expected, the watch didnt go off and i awoke to the french dude yelling amigo in my ear trying to tell me the train was stopped in barcelona now and if we didnt get off we were going to be going to france. i shook the hell out of nate and we booked out of that couchette in record time nearly missing barcelona. had we missed it, we would have ended in cerbera, france. close call.

it felt nice to be in barcelona.