The Alps

or ...

Where I have to get from Florence to Munich somehow and almost miss two trains.

or ...

How I accidentally ended up one valley over from the village my grandfather grew up in.

Trento, Trentino, Italy

Villa Rendena, Trentino is thata way.

The journey from the apartment in Florence to the hotel in Garching started with jumping on a bus that flashed a nice comforting sign with SMN (Stazione Santa Maria Novella) before proceeding to take me on a lovely tour of Florence. By the time we crossed the Arno I knew I was going to be running for it. So I ran. To find out that my train was 5 minutes late, which worked out fine. With a 23 minute layover in Bologna there was plenty of time. Then the train sat on the platform and 5 minutes turned into 15 and my nice 23 minute layover turned into 8.

Which could still be fine since how big could the Bologna train station possibly be? Famous. Last. Words.

The high speed trains come into tunnels underneath the surface train station. To get to the surface trains you have to go to an escellator, across a good section of the station and up another escellator and then up the correct stairs to your platform. In 8 minutes, while carrying 25 kilos over your shoulders. That scene in old movies when the herione jumps on the last car of the train and it starts moving a minute later? Been there. Done that.

The chaos was more than paid back by ending up in a 6 person compartment with two fellow Americans traveling around Europe who had also sprinted across the Bologna train station. If you are going to spent six hours on a train it's nice to have fun company that speaks your language and be able to spread out a bit. Oh and the view wasn't bad either.

In order, from Italy through Austria and into Bavaria.

The view back towards Bologna.

The Dolomites.

Welcome to the Southern Tyrols. This is still Italy.

Insbrook, Austria

Somewhere around the Italian-Austrian border I stopped taking pictures unless it looked like this:

Since this:

was barely worth pulling out the camera for.

My journey to Garching was capped with arriving in Munich and finding out that due to construction the metro was not running straight to Garching, but I needed to get on a metro to a bus to a metro. When the escalator down to the final transfer platform stopped running right when I got to the top of it, I just started laughing.