French Countryside
Paris, France - Day 19
Today sucked. We had a 13 hour trip from Paris to Naples via three different trains. I think I also caught a bug in Paris and started to feel pretty cruddy. I was 'that guy' on the train who was sneezing and coughing up a storm. We took the subway from our hotel in Paris to Gare de Lyon. There we got on a TGV train to Turino Porta Susa. We then switched over to the Italian line Trenitalia. That train took us to Rome. Up till this point I had printed out e-tickets for the train, but the next train made me print them out at the station. No big deal...except we only had 30 minutes between trains and our train into Rome was 15 minutes late. We ran to the nearest ticket terminal where the person was taking forever. We saw another one open and ran over to it, but it didn't work. At that point we went back to the first where the guy was still using it, but two other people were in front of us. We didn't even know at this point if this is where we printed off these tickets. I asked a nice old Italian man, and he tried to help me, but he didn't know what I was asking and instead was showing me where we find the board that lists the trains. We finally got our tickets printed and then went back to the board to find which terminal our train was at. I found the train number, but it said it was going somewhere else (similar to the bus in Belfast), we waited in line at an info booth and he told us which terminal. We ran there where fortunately for us, the train was late. It was rolling in right when we got there. We rode this packed train to Naples. During our train ride through Italy I started to notice some differences to the other countries we have visited. And that is graffiti and trash. Everywhere. That did not change in Naples. There are some posts on google maps that says it is unsafe around Napoli Termini (train station) after dark...,and we got there at 8:40pm. Our hotel was a 6 minute walk from the train station, so wielding my gopro pov pole as a bludgeon, we made our way to the hotel. We didn't really want to leave so we ate at the hotel restaurant. To give you an idea of the atmosphere here the response to ordering water to drink was, "...I only serve mineral and fizzy water." They were trying to make it a five star type of deal and I was wearing shorts and Katie sweat pants. It was kind of funny. At this point I was dying so I took some ibuprofen PMs and went to sleep.The one cool thing about today was seeing the French and Italian country sides. We saw farms, vineyards, hills, villages, and MOUNTAINS. We got to see a range of the Alps and they were beautiful.
