For her 15th birthday, Brian and I bought Annora tickets to the Twenty One Pilots concert in Łódź, to take place February 15. But things changed when we discovered that I was pregnant because our exciting travel plans for the coming summer needed to be put on hold for a year. Then some friends let us know they would be in Rome in February, the week after the concert. With Brian not needing to be on campus for Mich of the month, and able to hang out with Haven after preschool each day, Annora and I decided to take the train all the way to Rome!
Above: first class train
Below: Annora is ready for the TØP concert–so much symbolism!
Haven wanted yellow tape too! She liked hers over her mouth. 😆 So did we!
Next day, Annora and I hit the train. Łódź looked like a really neat city, and we wished we had had a few days to explore. This was the train station we left from in Łódź (below).
This was the first leg of the trip using our Eurail Passes, which allowed us 5 days of train travel within a month’s time.
Our plan:
In Kutno, Poland we stopped and had some lunch at the depot restaurant. Tomato soup, curry chicken, potatoes (with dill of course), and fresh cabbage salad (a type of “slaw” for those of you who say “y’all” 😉), and Cokes. Total cost was about $12 for both of us together.
First class has it’s perks! We had this compartment to ourselves almost all the way to Berlin, Germany. Also, snacks.
Meanwhile, back in Łódź, Brian and Haven had a feather-tastic day visiting the Papugarnia Carmen Parrot Center…
And getting dinner.
Below: Meet “Pinky-Pinky-Snowmelt”, Haven’s pink parrot. 😂😆🤣
We pulled into Berlin HBF after dark.
We had a short time to make our way through the multiple (4?) levels of Berlin HBF (mostly east-west lines) to the basement (north-south lines) where our connecting train was. It took us a while to figure it out. And when we found the platform, it looked like the train was the wrong one! After a minute’s speed walking, I realized that there was a second train parked super close behind the first! The first train left. The second train’s automatic doors started closing and we ran! I managed to get my hand in and jam the door so that it reopened. We hopped on, and found our seats as the train pulled away from the station. Whew! Aside from a stern, German “tut-tut” look from one of the ladies we passed, we were unscathed.
The only thing left to do was for Annora to finish up a week’s worth of early Algebra assignments and she’d be almost completely free to enjoy Rome mostly guilt free (and so would I).
(More in the next post.)
Meandering Meltons 