in Pescara situated on the Adriatic coast of Italy but...there were a few last minute
problems that changed the whole short-trip-to-Italy thing into a romantic
adventure to say the least. Firstly, from where we live, just outside of
Darmstadt centre, it takes 2 .5 hours to get to Frankfurt-Hahn Airport, the
nearest Ryanair departure point. This is normally ok as there is a bus that
travels from the main Frankfurt Airport to Frkft-Hahn and there is a nicely
scheduled timetable on the internet to plan your trip! Unless of course you
arrive at the Airport on time ready to transfer, via the bus, to Frkft-Hahn and
there is a new timetable which happens to start today, that is, the day that you
arrive there, and the timetable shows the new bus departure time as being 45
minutes ago! With that then, we went into the travel centre attached to the airport
to see about other possibilities of getting to the other airport...and there
were none that would have enabled us to arrive at the airport in time for our
flight...bummer, I hear you say...and I agree! so what did we do, I hear you
say...well, I decided that since we were all packed and ready to go away
somewhere, that we may as well go into the main Airport ticket sales area and see
if we could find a LAST MINUTE flight to somewhere...the last minute flights
were just like normal prices, so that was a bit out of the question since we only
planned to have a cheap trip away (I'm trying to save money for my driving
license and a car) so we decided that we could maybe take a train somewhere and
have a trip after all! We had talked about spending the few days in Strasbourg
before I surprised my girlfriend with the Italy idea, so we bought 2 return tickets to
Strasbourg, leaving in 15 mins...when we arrived on the platform we found that
the train was due 20 minutes later than the normal schedule, so, we waited, and
a train pulled in to the station some 20 mins late and we got on. The train left
the station and headed off in the direction of what we thought was Offenburg,
where we would catch the connecting train to Strasbourg. The next stop was
actually Wuerzburg and in the wrong direction but I wasn't sure exactly which
route we were taking or exactly where Wuerzburg was...now I know as I asked the
ticket inspector who informed me that we were going in the wrong direction and
the next stop was in fact Nurnberg and that our real train actually would have
pulled into the station immediately after the departure of the train we were on -
how was I supposed to know that! Great! so we got off at Nurnberg and I decided
it was too late for us to start travelling across to Strasbourg so we went to
the tourist information who found us a hotel room for the night. We had a
really nice meal though in a chinese restaurant, so the whole day wasn't totally
spoiled. We decided to travel down to Munich the next day which isn't that far
from Nurnberg. We spent the day and night in Munich and decided the
NEXT day we would brave the journey by train to Strasbourg as we had a ticket to
return to Darmstadt from there anyway. After spending a day and night in Strasbourg, and incidentally in a really nice hotel which happened to have a really nice special offer on at the time, we travelled back to Darmstadt which took a whole 1 hour and 40 minutes...such a long trip!
So that's our St. Valentine's 2002 adventure and although everything seemed to go
wrong from the start as far as the original plan was concerned, we both really enjoyed it after all.
The end :-)