Jon the travel agent strikes again.

The plan was simple: catch the 5:40 AM from Bologna to Milan and the 10:05 from Milan to Lucerne. What could go wrong? The following:

1. I misremembered the train time. We arrived at the Bologna station at 4:55 for what I thought was the 5:20. Good thing; we needed the extra 20 minutes.
2. I failed to print all the tickets back home. Small problem, momentary confusion: I had the tickets on my phone.
3. There was absolutely no signage in the station as to where our train would depart or even if it would depart. Zip. Nada. Nuthin’.
4. In desperation, I went to a self-serve kiosk to see if our train even existed. The only train to Milan Centrale was scheduled for 5:28. Despite holding tickets I bought three new tickets for 46 Euros. My error was that we really wanted to go to the Milan Girabaldi station, not Centrale. In my panic state I failed to select the correct station. But in my defense, desperate times called for desperate measures. Miss the Milan-Lucerne train and this whole house of cards collapses. We miss the Jungfraujoch and are late for the start of Carter’s tour.
5. But wait, there’s no indication of what track the 5:28 was leaving from. A train pulls in. Eventually Carter saw that Milan was displayed in the long list that crawled across the train’s display. We struggled on with our nine pieces of baggage.
6. On board, I figure out my error. The good news is that the two stations are 10 minutes apart by taxi; we have two hours to do that and get some food.

But wait, there’s more.

7. We finally got on the Milan-Luzern train but the coach I had booked our seats in turned out to be the Family coach. One mom with three boys under five sat near us. The seat assignments got all mixed up but eventually we worked out a plan where Mom got to sit with the kids and we had three seats together with a table between us. We played Quist.
8. Even more: somewhere along the line the car filled with what we took to be football (soccer) fans. The car was packed; most of the newcomers had to stand. The noise was deafening from crying babies and cheering futbol partisans.

Well, it all worked out somehow. We had a very nice lunch in the train’s dining car. The hardest part was finding a toilet in Milan. There were two in the entire station. One was out of service with all fixtures taped up. The other ate my Euro without opening the door. Two other ladies failed as well. Carter was ready to find a train at the platform with more than 15 minutes before departure, jump aboard, do his, ahem, you know, and jump off before it left. I didn’t know how I’d explain failure to his folks, so I vetoed the idea but gave it A for creative problem solving. We finally found a restaurant outside the station.

Our DayTrip driver met us at the Lucerne station and off we went to Grindelwald where tomorrow we’ll catch the Eiger Express to the “Top of Europe” at the Jungfraujoch.

We grabbed a burger, bratwurst, and some sort of pork steak at a café here at the hotel. Hit the spot. We scouted out the Eiger Express station, walked around for a bit admiring the scenery and then played some ping pong where, I’m pleased to say, the elderly players stood their ground quite admirably against the young whippersnapper.

All day we traveled through the lower elevations of the Alps. Grindelwald is set in a valley with gorgeous views of the mountains. I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Tomorrow we’ll get closeup views of some of the summits.