| A beautiful view of Lake Como and the surrounding mountains. |
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| Glenn's Lake Como Journals 06-21-02 Friday morning in San Sebastian and the plan is to pack and check out of our place, make reservations on the trains required to get to Milano, then work on the website and/or relax on the beach while we wait for the train to Hendaye later tonight. How did we do against the plan? We awoke, were packed and checked out of our place by 11:00 am this morning. So far so good!!! The hostal did not have any backpack storage but the train station did and that is our first stop this morning to confirm reservations on the night train to Paris. Once at the train station we noticed quite a few people waiting around but no one in line at the counters. Oh yes!!! You must take a number and we had 282 while they were working on 250. This was the numbers for tickets for future trains. There was also numbers for tickets required in the next 30 minutes (immediately), tickets made by reservation, and to make reservations. The immediately required tickets came first, tickets made by reservation second, to make reservations third and to buy tickets for future (We assumed more than 30 minutes) was fourth in priority. Most people walking in took numbers for the future trains but once people noticed the order of priority (after waiting a half hour for our number) they went back to the machine to get a number that had a higher priority. This was on top of the fact that there was only one peson working the counter and they had just come off of a day on strike. The plae was packed and the lines were moving no where!!! Finally after an hour of waiting, and watching many others grab a higher priority number we did the same. After an hour and a half of waiting our new number came up. I went to buy the tickets from the attendant but wanted to verify my options. He became very upset (communication barrier not helping) as I tried to explain to him that I wanted the train through Paris, not the train through Geneva. We quickly got no where and in his frustration decided that he was ready for break, shut down his window while I was still standing there, and closed the blinds right in front of me with a crowd of folks behind me already frustrated from having to wait more than an hour already. A new person stepped up to the booth next door but took the next number in line. To say the least I was very frustrated!!! We sat down at this point, very frustrated. Luckily we had kept our original number and they had made there way back to those numbers. While we were waiting Erin reverified the information on the connections that we wanted. We also had a copy of this itinerary that we kept out to show the next attendant that we saw. After 2 hours our original number came up. I let Erin go up this time as she was calmer and spoke better Spanish than I. Once at the counter she booked the ticket from San Sebastian to Hendaye only to have the attendant tell her that the system was down and could not make any reservations through France and that we would have to go to Hendaye to do that. I could not believe it!! I quickly got up, we grabbed our backpacks and headed off to Hendaye. I was not going to stay around this town any longer. There is a local train system that travels from San Sebastian to Hendaye. We went to the other train station and caught the next train to Hendaye. We arrived in Hendaye around 2:30 pm.. O.K. So were a little off schedule but we could still make up time in Hendaye while waiting for the night train which didn't leave until 11:15 pm.. At this point we haven't even booked the train to Paris yet so we didn't even know if we were leaving tonight or not. Our first stop was the main train station in Hendaye. Luckily it was only 50 meters from the station that we came in on so it was a quick walk. Once at the train station we got in the line for tickets required for today's travel. We were in line when another young lady opened another counter and waved us over. She was very friendly and within minutes she had us booked on the trains we requested. Boy, was that easy!! (Continued on next page) |