If I can pare travel down into one thing and one thing only, it's that traveling successfully is a mindset. While going to cool places helps you enjoy it, you have to be OK with the fact that something will inevitably go wrong. Embrace it, or else you'll be pretty upset.
Rain happens. Foggy, smoggy, hazy days happen. Awful tour guides in the group next to you happen. Trains run late, buses don't run at all, flights get cancelled. Open your mind a bit and realize that some of the most fun memories you'll have can happen when things are going completely wrong.
Last night I was reading through my own notes from our 9 months abroad and realized just how much I had forgotten from a trip to a place called Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. If you recognize the name, it's because you've read a lot of "10 European Towns You HAVE to See to Believe!" articles on god-knows-what website. Cesky Krumlov makes those lists because it looks like this. It's gorgeous.
We decided to go there and spend one night on our way from Prague to Vienna (to see my cousin who lives there/taught me how to ski incredibly effectively), but there was near-immediate confusion that I'd all-but forgotten. See, if you asked me two days ago, I would have said we took a bus, arrived in the evening, went to our room to sleep, and then strolled the beautiful town on an overcast day until we hitched a ride to Vienna. In retrospect, however...
We sat at a tremendously smelly outdoor bus station, waiting for our ride. There were very few signs in English, so we kept asking people where we ought to go, half-trusting their judgment. The bus was slated to leave at about 4:00 and it didn't show up until 4:15 as a crowd had gathered. We had specific seats on the bus, according to our ticket, and those seats had "reserved" signs on them, so we thought maybe we were wrong until it dawned on us that we were the reservation. There was supposed to be a toilet on the bus, but the door to it didn't open. There was also a coffee maker, which seemed dangerous to me.
So we left late and had no idea if we'd stop between the two locations.
We did stop. Probably 6 times. We had no idea which one was ours, and we only really panicked when a huge chunk of passengers all got off at a main station, only to have a few get back on. We asked the driver a couple of times when we should exit and he implied that we should wait til the end of the route. Of course, we knew we were supposed to arrive at, say, 8:00 p.m. but we had left late, so once 8:00 hit, we didn't know which stop would be ours.
Eventually it seemed like we were in the right place and everyone except us got off the bus. We tried to exit but the driver told us to wait one more stop. He proceeded to drive up a hill about one more mile away and dropped us off in an empty bus-depot parking lot in the pouring rain, at least a mile from the actual town center that we were looking for. We knew that the town was on the river, so we had to go downhill to find it, but the rain and darkness didn't do much for showing us how close we were.
Of course, a map would've helped, but I'd only taken screenshots of the area near our hotel. Oops.
In any case, we were cheerful enough about it and had a lovely walk through the rain, getting hopelessly lost and asking a stranger for directions toward a guest-house he'd never heard of. He pointed us roughly in the right direction and, nearly an hour after we arrived, we stumbled into the right place.
If nothing else, we had a story from it, and I would love to say that we took nice hot showers and had a wonderful night's rest.
But we had no hot water and the room never rose above 55 degrees. We froze. And then spent the whole following day walking around in an occasional drizzle, waiting for a long car ride to Vienna.
It was so cold that I slept in jeans for the first time since a 7th grade sleepover.
And yet here we are, laughing about it and talking about what a funny experience it was. It could've ruined our time in Cesky Krumlov, but it didn't. It wasn't our favorite place in all of Europe, but it was a delightful place to spend a night.
There were other disaster stories, of course. There was a train-strike on the day we were supposed to travel back to Milan and pick up our friend from the airport. We got "lucky" and only had to wait 2-3 hours before we could get back to the city. Thankfully, her flight was delayed.
We also got stuck outside of Torino in a train-strike. We were able to get a bus back to Torino thanks to the help of some strangers - we got the last two available seats on the bus - before waiting another several hours for a train back to Milan.
Chaos reigns. Embrace it or you'll seem like an angry old curmudgeon. Problems are as much a part of travel as sightseeing. Sometimes the chaos ends up giving you sights like this, a quintessential riverside village.
Rain happens. Foggy, smoggy, hazy days happen. Awful tour guides in the group next to you happen. Trains run late, buses don't run at all, flights get cancelled. Open your mind a bit and realize that some of the most fun memories you'll have can happen when things are going completely wrong.
Last night I was reading through my own notes from our 9 months abroad and realized just how much I had forgotten from a trip to a place called Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. If you recognize the name, it's because you've read a lot of "10 European Towns You HAVE to See to Believe!" articles on god-knows-what website. Cesky Krumlov makes those lists because it looks like this. It's gorgeous.
We decided to go there and spend one night on our way from Prague to Vienna (to see my cousin who lives there/taught me how to ski incredibly effectively), but there was near-immediate confusion that I'd all-but forgotten. See, if you asked me two days ago, I would have said we took a bus, arrived in the evening, went to our room to sleep, and then strolled the beautiful town on an overcast day until we hitched a ride to Vienna. In retrospect, however...
We sat at a tremendously smelly outdoor bus station, waiting for our ride. There were very few signs in English, so we kept asking people where we ought to go, half-trusting their judgment. The bus was slated to leave at about 4:00 and it didn't show up until 4:15 as a crowd had gathered. We had specific seats on the bus, according to our ticket, and those seats had "reserved" signs on them, so we thought maybe we were wrong until it dawned on us that we were the reservation. There was supposed to be a toilet on the bus, but the door to it didn't open. There was also a coffee maker, which seemed dangerous to me.
So we left late and had no idea if we'd stop between the two locations.
We did stop. Probably 6 times. We had no idea which one was ours, and we only really panicked when a huge chunk of passengers all got off at a main station, only to have a few get back on. We asked the driver a couple of times when we should exit and he implied that we should wait til the end of the route. Of course, we knew we were supposed to arrive at, say, 8:00 p.m. but we had left late, so once 8:00 hit, we didn't know which stop would be ours.
Eventually it seemed like we were in the right place and everyone except us got off the bus. We tried to exit but the driver told us to wait one more stop. He proceeded to drive up a hill about one more mile away and dropped us off in an empty bus-depot parking lot in the pouring rain, at least a mile from the actual town center that we were looking for. We knew that the town was on the river, so we had to go downhill to find it, but the rain and darkness didn't do much for showing us how close we were.
Of course, a map would've helped, but I'd only taken screenshots of the area near our hotel. Oops.
In any case, we were cheerful enough about it and had a lovely walk through the rain, getting hopelessly lost and asking a stranger for directions toward a guest-house he'd never heard of. He pointed us roughly in the right direction and, nearly an hour after we arrived, we stumbled into the right place.
If nothing else, we had a story from it, and I would love to say that we took nice hot showers and had a wonderful night's rest.
But we had no hot water and the room never rose above 55 degrees. We froze. And then spent the whole following day walking around in an occasional drizzle, waiting for a long car ride to Vienna.
It was so cold that I slept in jeans for the first time since a 7th grade sleepover.
And yet here we are, laughing about it and talking about what a funny experience it was. It could've ruined our time in Cesky Krumlov, but it didn't. It wasn't our favorite place in all of Europe, but it was a delightful place to spend a night.
There were other disaster stories, of course. There was a train-strike on the day we were supposed to travel back to Milan and pick up our friend from the airport. We got "lucky" and only had to wait 2-3 hours before we could get back to the city. Thankfully, her flight was delayed.
We also got stuck outside of Torino in a train-strike. We were able to get a bus back to Torino thanks to the help of some strangers - we got the last two available seats on the bus - before waiting another several hours for a train back to Milan.
Chaos reigns. Embrace it or you'll seem like an angry old curmudgeon. Problems are as much a part of travel as sightseeing. Sometimes the chaos ends up giving you sights like this, a quintessential riverside village.
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