The Medium Bad No Good Travel Day From Heck

It’s a good idea when you book train tickets to book them on the right day. A frazzled Graham in March didn’t do that, and four months later it turned into a mess.

I suppose its a good sign that Cam trusts me this much to not double check the booking dates. But when you want to go to Barcelona on July 3rd, tickets on July 1st just won’t do. It doesn’t help that every high speed train, or any train with reservations was completely sold out. So that’s how we ended up with tickets for the six hour 6:55AM one layover puddle-jumper from Montpellier to Barcelona.

It also doesn’t help that the train you just bought new tickets for doesn’t exist when you arrive at the station. We later learned the train was cancelled, but at the time, we didn’t know what to do. (At this point for you reading, it would be helpful to pull up a google maps and look for Montpellier to follow along with the madness). Luckily for us, there was a 6:59AM train to Sete, which is a little ways down the coast. Maybe that was our missing train, and will continue on past the terminus with new stops under a new banner.

Nope. It goes right back to the start. So now were in Sete (where we took the only photo of the day, seen above) at 7:15AM, with our two new friends, Xylo, a bicycle nomad from Idaho, and Lara, a German student, who are just as hopelessly confused as we were. We came up with a game plan, an 8:10 train to Narbonne, a 13 minute layover, and then a train to Perpignan. From there, we were close to the Spanish border. The goal was Port Bou, as from there, it was a slow train to Barcelona.

We lost Xylo somewhere in Narbonne. She had a bike, and was generally confused the whole time. Her destination was just east of Zaragoza, for Going Nowhere (A Spanish Burning Man festival). We can only hope she made it there in time for midnight, when the whole thing kicks off.

We got to know Lara very well over the 8 hours we spent together hopping from train to train. She was off to Madrid in a two part journey to Portugal. In Perpignan, we got some lunch and chatted. I don’t know how much she would like her personal life on the internet, so I won’t put it here, but we got to learn that she’s cut from the same cloth that Cam and I are. Very focused on achieving the things that she wants in life, and just going for it.

We made it to Port Bou after a 45 minute ride from Perpignan. This is the first Spanish city, just across the border. A angry Spanish cop asked for our passports, he seemed to be on the lookout for someone. Here we made our final switch to the train to Barcelona, but it wasn’t easy. Slowly, many backpackers have gathered here with the same ideas to make it to Barcelona. We arrived around noon, and there was one train parked in the six platform station. It ended up being our train, but it took us 15 minutes of guessing and reconfirmations to come to that conclusion. We were much faster than the boy scout group that was nearby, so that has to count for something.

The 2.5 hour ride from Port Bou to Barcelona was littered with stops in nameless towns every 5 minutes. We got to know the countryside very well as the train relaxed from the coast and went to the interior. This train ride, while painful with all the stops, was reassuring as we knew we would make it to our destination. Four layovers, 44 stops, and eight hours later, we made it to Barcelona in one piece. We later got conformation that Lara made it to Madrid, and eventually Lisbon after second terrible travel day.

The moral of the story is basic. Double check you booked he train for the right day. But a memorable day it turned out to be. Lets enjoy Barcelona next