First class travel...

I always ride second class when taking a train, so it was natural that I moved passed the first class cars to enter the train in the middle section. As I tried to find my reserved seat I noticed the car numbers were going down, not up. But as the train was not crowded I just sat down in an empty spot. The conductor later confirmed my suspicion: The train will split, and the part I was in would continue to a different area. So I had to relocate to the first class...

Imagine this: You get into a train that leaves in one country at 11:26, crosses a second and you arrive at 18:43 in the third country. And the train is right on time every single stop. Now imagine Amtrak going within the same county...(Yes, I know that Southern Pacific and others own the tracks and despite a federal law saying that track owners have to give the right of way to passenger service they never do – but still Amtrak is very inefficient, especially their bus service or even their web site).

Anyway, the ride was absolutely spectacular – though I missed some of the scenery due to the urge to make up for lost sleep (I had gone to bed past three am the night before and I had to get up at 9). It started out innocently enough with some rolling, forested hills, the occasional farm and small villages spread across the countryside.

But into Austria, the hills became mountains: Sometimes going straight up for a few thousand feet on both sides of the tracks. Rugged and rocky, covered in hard packed late spring snow. It was plain amazing.

The only trouble came at the border crossing into Slovenia, at Jesenice. I got off the train and asked a police officer which track the train to Nova Gorica was leaving from. He said it was likely track one. So I went to track one and saw their manual board showed track 4. So I went to the counter and asked and the lady told me track 2. None of the tracks were marked with their number – or at least not obvious to me, anyway. So I went back to the train I had just gotten off and asked the conductor there. He also pointed me towards track one. I mentioned that the board said track 4 and he pointed to the adjacent track and said “Ok, that is track 4”. Now that was curious: If that was track 4, then I arrived at track two, and the next one over closest to the station would be track one. And track? I’ll never know… I went back to track one as a train had just arrived. It said Nova Gorica on it and the conductor there said it was leaving from track 1. In fact he had someone move the four to a one on the manual board. Aha – a programming error.

So I got it right and continued my beautiful journey through this awesome region. There were a few tunnels and bridges and one went over a stream where people were standing and fishing. It rained hard for a bit, which made me remember I traveled lightly: no rain coat and a pair of solid Sandals…

But once I got off in Nova Gorica, the rain very light. I walked to the hotel, which was easy to find and very close – about a 15min walk from the train station. The hotel itself was obviously a getaway for the Italians (the border is kinda close – there was a fence across the street next to the train station – hopping the fence would mean hopping into Italy…). There was a casino and everybody including a blondie like me was greeted in Italian.

I had dinner, then went up to the room. The TV programs are cool. They had most languages that I can deal with ,plus a few more. Besides Slovenian they also offered TVE (the Spanish channel), all the Italian ones obviously, a couple of German channels (would have preferred the public ones over those boring cable channels), French, British, and American (CNN, MTV and even TCM). Some of the Italian channel had Columbo and Something about Maty on – sounds funny with the actors’ voices synchronized into Italian…

Now it’s bedtime. I will go downstairs to upload this report ( no internet access in the room, unfortunately) then head for some good night’s sleep to see how the work assignment tomorrow will pan out.