You may recall…
…that instead of going to Barcelona that fateful day in Amsterdam we ended up going to Copenhagen, Denmark because all of the trains to Barcelona were booked. Well, yeah.
How we were saved from this situation is largely thanks to the exceptionally competent booking agent that we happened upon in the train station. Our first attempt to book something over to Barcelona was unfruitful, dealing with a relatively young redheaded girl who was only able to find us a twenty five hour train to Barcelona leaving at 6:00 tonight and arriving at 7:00 there. Horrified by the prospect of a twenty five hour train ride again, Ben and I agreed to try to find another destination somewhere in between that could break it up so as not to lose as much daytime. To no avail we tried Rome and Munich, both of which would’ve entailed ridiculously long train rides to Barcelona, not solving our problem.
We tried our luck with the next clerk, not yet aware of how much the man he was. His name was Beat Wizemann, and his badge was decorated with one flag for each language that he spoke fluently: english, spanish, italian, german, and french (imagine a man with his linguistic prowess choosing the menial job of printing tickets for far less educated travelers like Ben and I). He informs us that the train that the other lady advised us to take was actually booked, and so we had no way of arriving in Barcelona tomorrow.
We ask him if there was a way that he could help us decide on a middle destination in which to spend the night. The champ whips out a map, on which Ben throws his palm down over the area in between Switzerland and Spain and says “something in this region.” Couple clicks at the computer and he has our entire itinerary planned for us.
We are leaving for Montpelier tomorrow morning, which he told us is thriving with language students, exactly the type of people Ben and I want to see: young and English speaking. Then we’ll pull in to Barcelona the next afternoon, where we’ll chill out until our day long excursion to Malaga for a scuba diving trip, punctuated by an overnight train on the way there and back. Finally, we’ll go from Barcelona to Paris, where we’ll spend the night before returning home.
