Anabasis

After a cold night in Milan, we enjoyed a cold morning hike to the train station in Milan, where we caught a train. Though delayed, it eventually hauled us across out of Italy, and we passed the next few hours gawking at the alps.

This train deposited us in Basel, Switzerland, which was also exceedingly cold. Our layover allowed us enough time to peek outside for lunch, so we wandered for a bit and whimpered at the prices of lunch until finally realizing that they were in Francs. We also visited a charming Christmas Market in the square, where small Swiss children were lining up to ride a wheeled toboggan down a long wooden slide.

We then returned to the station just in time to see the cancellation of our train to Amsterdam. (Europe has apparently never had snow before, so trains get scared and won't leave their stations.) However, there was a train to Frankfurt, from whence we could catch a connection to Holland. We boarded this immediately and cleverly coerced it into venturing out into the cold.

Arriving in Frankfurt, we had no trouble catching the connecting train, as it was delayed as well, but managed to depart. We did not manage, however, to make it home, for we were unceremoniously dropped in Cologne with the news that all of Holland had simply shut down and that no train would dare approach the border. We were then promised a hotel room for the night, so we waited in line for an hour and were eventually informed that every room in every building in the city and region around Cologne was absolutely filled, and that we should take the next train to Dusseldorf, where every hotel was certainly empty. We did so, and were informed that, if any hotel rooms had ever existed in Dusseldorf, they were filled, and that we should go to Cologne, which has lots of hotels and rooms.

Then the small but irritable crowd of Dutch travellers staged a rather violent and destructive riot, and several information desk workers soon found their heads mounted on pikes. The remaining clerk, nervously watching as we sharpened another stick at both ends, pulled out a dust-covered hotel directory and began calling around. Shocking! There were so many available rooms in Dusseldorf, all within walking distance of the station.

And so, on our third day of attempting to get home, we departed from Dusseldorf delayed by only fifty minutes on a train filled to twice its capacity. This train bravely plowed its way over the Dutch border, and we were able to successfully climb out of it in Utrecht and into an equally crowded regional train to Rotterdam.

From the Rotterdam central station, we ice-skated home, finally presenting ourselves on the doorstep just after noon.