Written 21 December 2009
(This is a rather long screed, so I broke it into pieces. Click here for part 2, or here for part 3. )
Tonight is technically the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, but Shannon and I know better. For us, it was last night, and the forces of light have already defeated the forces of dark. What follows is story of a hapless holiday travelers. It is not a particularly tragic tale, not one that would get the 5 minute “human interest” piece on CNN about the “Blizzard of ’09 strands holiday travelers: area woman unable to rejoin family before double-lung bypass surgery on plane to Iraq deployment while carrying gift baskets to child cancer survivors.” For that matter, lots of people had worse trips here in Europe.
No, nothing so tragic -- just a sucky couple of days.
Winter break is finally here! It was a draining few weeks leading up to it, with parent-teacher conferences, Science Fair, and lots of special holiday events to keep the calendar busy. We were ready to relax. Some internationals chose to fly back to the US/Canada for some family time, but we figured that was too expensive, too much of a hassle, and how often would we have a chance to spend Christmas in Europe?
We didn’t have big plans for break. We just wanted to visit a few friends in Europe, see some pretty scenery, and get a chance to speak German (for me) and English (for both of us). We decided to head to London for New Year’s (visiting Chryssi & David) and Austria for Christmas (visiting Meghan & Justin from Montana while they were visiting Meghan’s parents).
It is hard to get to Austria from Sofia. Flights were over $400, and the bus/train takes 24+ hours. But we found a $25 one-way flight (really) direct to Venice on WizzAir. Sweet. We planned two nice days reprising our honeymoon in Venice, then take the train into Austria (only 6-7 hours now), saving both money and time. Our flight to Venice was Saturday afternoon – nice and relaxing, with no early morning or red-eye flight to screw up our sleep schedule.
We got checked onto our outbound flight, stamped out of the country at Bulgarian emigration, and loaded onto a plane-bound airport bus. Then for no apparent reason, people started leaving the bus, some crying. What’s going on? No announcement, just people leaving the bus and heading back into the terminal. (Life in Bulgaria, especially when you’re flying el-cheapo airlines, is a series of unexplained events forcing information-poor decisions.) Turns out our flight had been canceled. No explanation.
Eventually we found out that all flights into and out of Venice were cancelled that day due to “the biggest snowstorm we’ve ever had here.” Luckily WizzAir has another flight in a few hours and would happily re-book us. Oh wait, that’s what might happen on a real airline. The next WizzAir flight was 3 days later, putting us into Venice one day after we planned on leaving Venice. Along with our Sofia friends Brett & Betsy, who were also stuck not getting to Venice, we considered playing poker with our WizzAir paperwork that theoretically at some point might allow us to get our money back. Can’t say I’m too hopeful on that front.
Time to go back home to regroup (after we found a taxi, which was rather difficult as we weren’t on a scheduled arriving flight). We spent several hours on the internet searching for new flights and hotels, but eventually found a reasonable option. (While at home, we also helped the brother of a Bulgarian colleague who was stuck in Washington D.C., in their blizzard, and who needed a ride to Dulles and/or a place to crash for the night. It’s a weird, wonderful interconnected world. Thanks Neil!) We tried to convince the hotel in Venice not to charge us for the two nights of hotel we’d reserved and couldn’t get to. Still waiting to hear on that one.
We ended up with a $117 flight to Milan the next day. It would have been fun to visit Venice, but our priority was getting to Austria to meet up with Meghan, Justin, and baby Orla. The train from Milan to Innsbruck was about the same distance as the one from Venice to Innsbruck. Sunday morning we went to the Sofia airport much earlier than usual, to avoid any holiday crush of travelers. We zip through security, and then wait. And wait.
And wait.
Our flight is never officially delayed, but we ended up taking off 1.5 hours late. Apparently the entire Sofia Airport had been closed for 45 minutes due to whiteout conditions, but they hadn’t ever mentioned that to anyone actually in the airport.
We had given ourselves a 2 hour buffer to catch a train in Milan, but with the flight delays we were now getting pretty worried about making our train. Surprisingly, the shuttle bus from the airport to Milan worked flawlessly, getting us to the central train station in plenty of time to discover that our train was canceled. That same snowstorm that canceled our flight to Venice the previous day had apparently royally screwed up the Italian train system. Here I mistakenly thought trains were much less susceptible to weather shenanigans than airplanes. Luckily for us, they didn’t bother putting up the “cancelled” sign until moments after we purchased the ticket for that train, forcing us to wait in a very long line for customer service to refund our money and change our ticket. [I would like to award a personal Medal of Traveler Heroics to the man who wore his Santa suit around the train station and passed out candy. Thanks, Milano Centrale Santa, for keeping spirits up among thousands of cold, confused, distressed people.]
Above (top): Brett, Betsy, and Shannon, waiting in line in Milano to change our tickets off canceled train #1. Above (bottom): Milano Centrale Santa, handing out candy. You Rock!
Did I mention it was cold? Think about waiting for a train in a cramped, smelly, smoky meat locker. Americans usually don’t have much to crow about when comparing our train system to the European train system, but here is one area I think we’ve got an edge: heat. Europeans apparently don’t believe that train stations ought to be heated. Whether it is the giant fascist Milano station, the functional, modern, and attractive Innsbruck station, or the dilapidated and oppressively Stalinist Sofia station, none are heated. They actually seem colder than the outside, as they never see sunlight or warmth. Some of the internal rooms/offices are heated, but the main halls and waiting areas are iceboxes. We had tried to pack extremely light for this trip (a total of one small suitcase, one small daypack, and a shopping bag for all of our stuff for two winter weeks). Therefore we weren’t really prepared to endure hours of waiting in a smoky meat locker. We were so excited when our train out of Milan finally showed up, as it meant we could at least wait in a somewhat warm train car, out of the meat locker.
Coming up in Part 2: Verona: "Why the DMV waiting room doesn't seem so bad anymore..."
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