Two long travel days

Well this is not quite as exciting as some of my other posts, but I figured it needed to be fit in somewhere. I left Sorento in Italy, which is on the south western side and had to make my way over to the eastern side of the country to catch a ferry to Greece. Of course, my travel day it would be raining, so my day began at 7:30 am while standing in the rain to catch a bus into the train station. Due to the rain, the bus was running late and what should have taken about 15 minutes to get there ended up taking about an 1 1/2 hours. I think there were ants going quicker than us! Upon arriving at the station, this train was also running late, so I jumped on the next on and arrived in Naples, where I had to connect with another train to Bari where the ferryport is. I got my ticket and my train was set to leave at 2:30 where I had to change in the journey and had a half an hour time between train changes. Of course, the train got delayed and I was getting a bit anxious because there is exactly 1 ferry to Greece each day and I did not want to miss it and half to waste another day of valuable time waiting around for the ferry. We all boarded the train when they came around and hearded us all off, why I am not sure as they were all speaking in rapid Italain and the locals were having a fit with the train workers. About 15 minutes later we all got hearded back on the train and I was franctically looking at the time because now my time between trains was down to 15 minutes and I knew the train would be moving slower due to the rain. I arrived at the station with 10 minutes to spare because the connecting train was running late.

I finally arrived in Bari around 7pm that night (a journey that should have only taken about 5 ended up taking 12). I was a bit anxious because now I had 1 hour to make my way to the port, get a ticket(cause of course I had no reservation yet) and board. I went and asked about buses there. The good news was that there was one that went directly to the port. The bad news was that it did not arrive until 7:25 and it was a 23 minute ride there. That was cutting it extremely close. A minute or so later, I saw these 2 American looking guys about my age running over doing what appeared to be the same thing I was, trying frantically to get to the port in time cause they did not want to spend the night in Bari and I heard them speaking English. Keep in mind, it is still raining so all of this is taking place among wet feet and clothes. I asked them if they were headed to the ferry port to catch the ferry to Greece and they said yes. I suggested that we share a cab and so we hopped in a cab to go cause it was after 7pm. We got way over charged because they knew we were not Italian, they knew the ferry leaves at 8 and there is only one and obviously, we had no options but to take a cab so we were stuck between a rock and a hard place. After negotiating a bit, we jumped and and got there around 7:40pm. All 3 of us go running into the ticket office purchase our tickets and jump on board 10 minutes before departure. A bit of a stressful day!

On the ferry, I met a mother and daughter headed to Athens, a guy from Japan, a guy from Brazil, and a guy from Chile and all of us were headed to Athens, so we made our way together to the train station, to the next train station where we had to change and then to the Metro with the help of a very friendly local who luckily spoke English cause the Greek alphabet is way different than ours and not everything is written in the English way. Finally, around 7pm, we arrived at our hostel and boy was that great to see!