The worst travel day of my life
So many of our wounds are self-inflicted, you know? Here’s the story of the worst travel day of my life.
My family spent six weeks in Italy. Glorious! Also difficult at times! While my wife Colleen was off teaching for a few days, I took myself, our two kids, my parents, and our nephew on a side trip adventure to Naples (Napoli). This is the true story (no, seriously, 100% true) of one very, very, very long day of misadventures.
The first mistake
Really, it all started back when my parents were getting themselves out to Italy to meet us, and in the chaotic parts of all that, we neglected to schedule and book our side trip to Naples, Pompeii, and Campobasso. So there I was, the day I was supposed to take the kids by myself to meet the parents and my nephew in Rome, frantically booking rooms and rental cars and bus tickets.
Those of you who are experienced travelers are screaming at your screen, “You fool! Never plan an ad hoc trip, are you mad?!”, to which I reply, also screaming, “I KNOW THAT *NOW*, PAIN IS HOW YOU LEARN THINGS.”
So I book all the things, Colleen prints the bus tickets for me, and we get the kids and me packed and out the door and onto the bus from Siena to Rome. I relax, a little. We did it.
Fast forward to the following evening. The parents, the nephew, the kids, and I have done a day in Naples. Naples is like Rome if Rome had a debilitating drug habit and chose to constantly defecate on itself and had no laws governing the roads. But we got around, despite a decent amount of stress on my part as I dragged the crew hither and yon, plotting a course to the various things and trying to keep tired kids happy.
Now the kids are in bed, and we are packed and ready for the next day. I set my alarm so I have time to get up, walk to the rental car place, drive the car back to our flat, throw the bags in it for our jaunt to Vesuvio then Pompeii then Campobasso, and clear out of the flat by 11am.
I have...a feeling. You know what I mean. But I’ve booked everything already, so I’m good y’know? I mean, right?
I get up at 9am. I open my laptop to double check my car rental reservation. Aaaaaand I can’t find it. I’m working on this for what seems like a sweaty eternity. Seriously, where the F is it?! The car is our lifeline, because it’s our mobile home base for the next two days. I check all my email accounts, I check the spam folders. Meanwhile everyone else is getting up, and they’re already getting squirrelly.
This is when I realize that the rental car booking didn’t book. After I recruit Colleen remotely to figure out where the confirmation email is, we find it and I read: “Please allow 48 hours for Booking.com to confirm your reservation with Europcar.” It hasn’t quite been 48 hours yet, because I threw the trip together the day we left. (“Bro, what is WRONG with you, why would you do that??!!” To which I reply, “I KNOW! I know.”)
This is when the first domino falls, the chickens come home to roost, and other idioms.
Crappily in Napoli
We do not have a car, which is to say, we don’t have anywhere to put our bags nor our bodies as of 11am. Again, Naples is not a charming little Italian town; it’s a scary, loud, fast, dirty, large place.
I’m scrambling. Can we do buses for the whole thing? No one is making coffee happen. I suggest the adults take the kids to the nearby botanical gardens so I can figure this all out. No one hears me.
I think we can do buses, and we have a place in Campobasso waiting for us, but--nope. Nope, we don’t. The Airbnb person had 24 hours to respond but didn’t. I didn’t catch that in the previous day’s chaos. We don’t have a place to stay tonight. We don’t have a way to get anywhere. We don’t have any place to put our crap.
If we can leave our bags in the flat, I think I can make it work. I call the Airbnb guy for THIS flat, Ricardo. Multiple times. He’s MIA.
It’s 10:20, 10:30, 10:45. We have minutes before we’re out on the street. I do not have a plan. Ricardo is unresponsive so maybe we have some time before--nope. Nope, at 11am sharp the cleaning crew arrives. I lose it. I’m swearing profusely and throwing things into the suitcase (I had this packed 9 hours ago, how did it unpack itself?) I am caffeine-less, still.
The two very nice cleaning women and their little bambino they brought along do not speak English. With half my family and half our luggage halfway out the narrow door and into the narrow hallway, I pull it together and paint what I hope passes for a pleasant smile on my face (but I don’t think they’re buying it), sit down with them on the steps, and use one of the World’s Greatest Inventions--the conversation feature on Google Translate--to ask them if we can please leave our bags here. Please. Our rental car fell through. Please.
They see it in my eyes. They will help. They call Ricardo, who is still MIA. (I get the impression that this is *so* Ricardo.) But they do get Fabio on the phone, and Fabio says okay. I exhale. Grazie mille, grazie mille, grazie mille. The ladies see that we are stupid Americans and that I am a slightly panicking and slightly rage-fogged stupid American and also a parent, and they are kind. Prego, prego.
We get ourselves and our lite loadouts for the day down the three (or was it 78?) flights of marble stairs. We are out on the street, and our bags are safe...but we are otherwise stranded. I do not have a plan. My five family members are standing there quietly, waiting.
Let’s go to the botanical garden. The children can frolic, I hope, and I will open my laptop and figure this out. Andiamo!
It’s a few blocks. It seems further. We climb the stairs to the garden, where there is a little office. (Why. That is so dumb. You’re killing me Naples.) I’m bringing up the rear, and I try to shout at my family to just go up the steps, it’s open and free, I already checked, this is why I got the Airbnb in this location while they are simultaneously trying to get this information from the nice Italian workers who don’t speak English. “JUST. GO. UP.,” I say through sweat and clenched teeth. We crest the steps. We are in the botanical gardens. I find a bench, tether my phone, and try.
I find the buses. This will work. That will work. Okay. What are everyone’s ages and birthdays. All the information. I’m close. I’M CLOSE. I can do this. I can--nope. Nope, the online bus ticket system throws up an error, and I’m almost going to throw the laptop into a tree in the lovely Napoli botanical garden and do some moderate to heavy screaming.
Then… *boop*.
A notification.
It has been 48 hours and OMG THE CAR RENTAL RESERVATION CAME THROUGH ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG!!
A second chance!
We. Are. Saved. The plan is back on, and all we’ve lost is [checks watch] ack, a bunch of hours. How is it already after 1pm? But okay, we will walk to the rental car place, drive back to the flat, grab our crap, and off we go. We can still make it Mt. Vesuvius and Pompeii and then get to a place to sleep tonight!
I inform the troops. We decide to grab lunch on the walk to the rental car place, which is at the bus station. We got this! We’re standing in line. The lady at the rental car place is sort of adorably goofy. I hear her exclaim into the phone, “Mamma mia!” at least once. I mean, come on. I like her. But this is taking forever. I find her less and less charming as she bumbles around. I think she locks herself out of the office for a bit, but she totally plays it off and goes to get someone else’s keys, and I kind of appreciate how smooth she did that with a line of grumpy people to get to. But I’m one of those people, so… Mamma mia...
Finally, it’s my turn. Her English is decent. (My Italian is trash.) “Okay,” she says with a thick accent. “We have your nine-seater--” and I blanche, and she sees it. “No-no,” I begin to sputter, “I reserved a seven-seat minivan, and--” She interrupts me with a smile and shrug. “Eet’s okay,” she says, “Eet’s just two more seats.”
I let myself be convinced of this utter falsehood. She is telling me that the seven-seat minivan I reserved is exactly the same as this nine-seat monster truck, as if they just put two more seats in the same-sized vehicle. But that violates the law of physics that states matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time, which I do not think about in this moment because my science is even worse than my Italian and I am letting this silly Italian woman with the thick glasses convince me that a fundamental law of the universe has been bent by Europcar, so don’t worry, you’ll be fiiiiine.
[Clickety clickety clickety go the dominos] This was another turning point. I should have insisted on the minivan, but it was clear that they didn’t have one at *any* of the Naples locations. I should have just spun on my heel and shouted something douchey like, “THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN IN *AMERICA*,” but then I would not have a car to drive, and it’s already well after 3pm and I’d have to book like 12 bus tickets (can we even make it at this point?), and she and her glasses would just be relieved to have one less person in her line.
It’s like if you’ve been dying for a drink of water, and I mean really dying for it, and you finally find a little oasis in the desert that has a cool cool glass for you. And they hand it to you but say, “Oops! There’s a bunch of my dandruff in there, sorry! Don’t worry, it’s still fine.”
What do you do in that situation? You drink the damn water, obviously. And so I took the nine-seater. “It’s just a minivan with a couple extra seats,” I believe to myself.
It is not just a minivan with a couple extra seats. It is *at least* two feet wider and longer than a minivan. You can fit an entire baseball team in it, with seatbelts. But I have a vehicle that can house my family and our possessions, so I’m winning this round, right? Right?
The Italian woman says to me, “You want full accident coverage? Eet ees...50 euro.” [pause] “Per day.” This feels like a shakedown, and she can see me hesitating. But she gives me this look and narrows her eyes just a little and says gently, “Yyyyyou need the full coverage.” She nods slightly. “You need eet.” Then she smiles. I got the full coverage.
This decision would prove to be the only good one I made the entire day. Looking back, I know what the look meant: She knew.
She. Knew.
Lawlessness
I pull out onto a street in downtown Naples.
What are you picturing? If it’s anything but second-world chaos, you got it wrong. There are 1,000 vehicles per square inch of pavement, and there are no painted lane lines and no traffic signals of any kind. They probably would have filmed “Mad Max” here, but it was too crowded.
The only way to turn onto a road is to cut someone off. And so I did. I punched it, hard. First gear roared, the scooters and cars hit their brakes, and we were on the road. SUCK IT, NAPLES!
Within seconds, though, I was on a road that was built for a maximum of two horses abreast. Instead, there were three cars filling up space and one opening between them. You see, the lunatics in Naples double- and triple-park like it’s a Thing You Can Do. If you need them to move, you lay on the horn for a while until they finish their dinner or whatever. This is precisely as inefficient as it sounds.
But I see this gap, and I see other cars shoot the gap, and hey I’m just in a minivan with a couple extra seats, so I got this, right? But it’s NOT a minivan. It is a Beast.
I shoot the gap.
I almost make it.
I am stuck--STUCK--on some poor schmuck’s rear quarter panel. It’s on our passenger side, and Dad somehow shimmies out to examine. My hubcab is bent and is making me stuck. Somehow we get the hubcap removed, by--I think--grinding it against the guy’s car until it falls off.
I pull around the block, and Dad runs back to see what to do. The guys are Chinese. They don’t want to call the cops. Dad works it out. I don’t ask questions. Now we have to back the Beast into Naples traffic, and oop--I’m definitely blocked in on all sides. Cool. Coolcoolcool. Then one guy finally moves his car, and Dad walks into traffic and just holds his hand up to stem the tide of vehicles, and I gun it in reverse while trying to avoid ending my father’s life on a dirty, busy street in Naples by running him over in a not-minivan.
He hops in. We’re on the way. All of Naples seethes at the delay.
We somehow find our flat. Brady (the nephew) and I run up the stairs to the flat, grab EVERYthing, and lug it down the stairs in one trip. We got this, yo.
It takes us what feels like 136 hours to get out of the city. Again, there are no rules on these roads. No lanes, no traffic signals, few street signs, but lots and lots of cars and suicidal scooterists. I make it out of Naples and onto the highway with no further accidents. This, friends, is An Accomplishment.
Vesuvio, almost
A few minutes down the road is the exit for Mount Vesuvius. We have like an hour to make it to the parking lot at the top and pound the 20-minute hike to the summit. We think we can make it. We definitely want to try.
The drive up is confusing but beautiful, and we just enjoy it, but DUDE does it take a long time. The Beast is displeased with me because the whole drive is at an 89.9-degree angle, but I don’t care because it is a minivan (right? Just with two extra seats?) and is also a rental.
We get to a crossroads near the top of Vesuvius, and a man driving a tour bus shouted at me out the window--something about how something was closed, blah blah blah. We later learned that he was trying to be a mensch and let us know that we should hurry up the road and get to the parking lot because they were closing the trail in 10 minutes.
We figure this out too late. We missed it. We traveled 60 billion miles total and missed getting on the trail to the summit of Vesuvius by a couple of minutes.
I’m no longer in a panic. But I am disappointed. The day has sucked, and we didn’t get to see Vesuvius, and because we gambled on Vesuvius and lost, we also lost on seeing Pompeii (which closes at 6pm). I’m dejected. But we decide to head down to Pompeii (it’s just a few kilometers) to see what we can do there. Maybe we’ll get to see *something*, and hey we’re right here, so.
We get to Pompeii. There’s a place to park for free, and I’m stoked. The place looks like the parking lot for a national park. I’m thinking that maybe we’ll extract something out of this.
The parking spots are tiny, and they’ve turned the whole place into an orange grove of sorts. It looks like a parking lot for children’s cars. I know this somewhere in my head, but I still have allowed myself to believe that I am driving a minivan (definitely not a minivan). I also believe that parking spots are large enough for cars, and those branches are surely trimmed back enough so cars can fit into the spots. I’m doing a lot of reasoning here, but I am both completely exhausted mentally and also have been convinced earlier in the day that physics is a lie.
So as I swing into a spot, I beef it. I mean, I totally beef it. A branch of an orange tree crashes through a rear driver’s side window. The sound is worse than you’re imagining. My mother exclaims, in prayer not in swear, “God help us!” We hear 20 thuds on the roof. “He harvested most of the oranges on the tree,” my father tells someone later.
I am done.
Done.
But...I can’t be done. Because we are in Pompeii, and we have lodging in Campobasso two or so hours away, and I do not know what to do, again. We are stranded, again.
The extremely nice man there at the park gate calls his buddy and then tells us the buddy is waiting for us at his body shop. I’m baaarrrely functioning, but we somehow find this shop. The extremely nice buddy has stayed open for us. They vacuum out all the glass and send us on our way.
I am grateful, but I once again have no plan. I pull onto a Pompeii street with nothing but a hole in the side of the Beast and a banging noise inside my skull. “I don’t have a plan,” I say out loud to the group.
Someone suggests we find somewhere to eat, because it’s like 7:45pm. In a daze, I end up somewhere near somethings, and we stop. The rest of the crew files out to walk to someplace to eat something, and I stay back to call Europcar to ask what to do while guarding all of our possessions because one of the giant Beast windows is now missing.
If you ask the internet, it will tell you that the numbers you need for Europcar are on your rental agreement. This is false. It takes me an hour to find the *right* number and ask the right people the right questions. Still, the plan is inconclusive.
I think I lost time there for a bit, because that stretch--sitting in a not-minivan as the sun sets on Pompeii, full bladder and empty stomach, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with the Beast, without a plan--was tough.
Do we have to turn in the car? Where would one do that? I ain’t driving back into Naples for that. Do we stay in Pompeii? Do we drive all the way to Campobasso where we already have lodging scheduled? Where do I store the Beast? Because it has a giant hole in the side where one could crawl in and steal All The Things, including the Beast itself.
In the end, I got a Europcar rep on the phone and made him tell me that it was okay to drive to Campobasso and leave the car overnight. I MADE him say it.
I wolfed down the weird but delicious Italian “hamburger” that my parents got for me, we herded the kids from the restaurant (down the street) into the Beast, and we were off for Campobasso.
I have a chance to breathe a little. This has been an awful day. And we are driving a broken Beast, with cool air whizzing all around us. The kids are cold. But I think….we’re...okay? But then again, the sun has set. I am driving a Beast. With a missing window. In a foreign country. At night. Through the mountains.
And then it started raining.
The shame in Campobasso
It rained for most of the two-plus-hour drive. I hope that the Beast and I don’t slide off the road and down a mountain, killing us all. We make it to Campobasso, a small and charming little town. It’s after midnight. We find the alley that leads to our charming little flat. I can’t find the actual flat, though.
[Clickety clickety clickety] See, when I booked the place, I thought it was like a lodge with an around-the-clock person staffing it. It’s not. It’s a tiny place somewhere down an alley and up a smaller alley. I call the guy. He doesn’t answer. I call again. I email. To date, I have not heard back from the guy.
We are stranded. Again. AGAIN. It’s raining, and it’s after 1am now, and we are in a sleepy town in the middle of Italy and I am out of ideas. Again. I do not have a place for my children to sleep tonight except for a Beast that is collecting rain through an irreparable hole in its side.
I don’t panic this time, because I am out of panics and freakouts and screams and swears. I think I’m truly losing it, though. I don’t think I’m calculating time correctly, for example? It has more or less stopped. I am aware that I am wet. I can feel the drizzling rain, and I can smell the cobblestones and the sweet dankness of water on medieval stone. I am aware that I am standing in a gorgeous little storybook alley in a beautiful Italian town where my great-great grandparents lived before they emigrated to the U.S. I am aware that I certainly have distant cousins who are asleep in the buildings all around me, who don’t know me and can’t help me in this moment. I am aware that the day has been an abject failure, and that it is *not even over yet*, even though technically it’s been tomorrow for an hour already. I am aware that five people are sitting in the Beast, waiting, hoping I have answers. I don’t.
But my wife does. Colleen, aware of the entire situation from afar, has found us a hotel in Campobasso. Okay. Oh-KAY. Ok. OK. Now all I have to do is back the Beast out of this alley.
Did I not mention that? I have the Beast parked in an alley--an ancient street, actually, but one that was built to be wide enough for a horse-drawn cart, but not a car, and most definitely not a Beast--and I can’t drive it further, because I know enough now, after having had my ad hoc belief system shattered like so much window glass, to know that if I drive the Beast any further down this alley, I will never, ever get it out, and we won’t be able to open the doors, so the only way we’ll be able to escape is through the shattered window. And then in the morning some Italian with maybe the same surname as me will have to throw down a rope ladder from their third story window so we can climb off the roof and into their adorable little apartment, and they’ll have to burn the Beast to the ground in order to remove it from this alley, and all of them will look upon their distant cousin and shake their dewy-skinned, good-looking, dark-haired heads at me. “Americans,” they’ll mutter.
The only way out is to put it in reverse, but somehow even in the middle of the night, someone has boxed me in. We convince him to unbox me in. Now I have to go the wrong way down a one-way street (in a rental in the middle of the night in the dark in the rain, you remember from before). Dad flags down a cop to make sure it’s okay that we do this. It is. They wave me back and around and whatever, and then across a pedestrian area--a pedestrian area--and send us on our way with a wave and a terse smile.
I note that the cop looks like he could blend in at our family reunion. “Americans,” he mutters in my imagination. “I know right?” I almost say out loud.
We are extracted. Now all we have to is find the hotel that will save us tonight.
We can’t find the hotel.
It’s on the Google Map. The GPS is almost stern with us after a while. I imagine the polite GPS woman as an actor who has been playing calm all this time but breaks character in exasperation to say, “It’s RIGHT HERE dude. God. RIGHT HERE.” Then maybe she mutters something about Americans under her robot breath. But we can’t find it, GPS lady. We drive around and around this area, and there is no hotel. Finally someone spots the hotel’s sign, up on a hill. There it is! But we can’t find an entrance.
I park and just...run around, up some stairs. I need a better vantage point. I am unsure if it’s rain on my face or if I’m crying, because that’s where I’m at right now.
Then I find it. I can see it. The entire hotel is *walled*. Aha! It has gates, but you can’t see through them. It may as well be a secret embassy in a foreign country instead of a hotel. I spy the gate I need from above, but it’s closed and locked.
I jog down the steps and run around the wall to it. I’m standing there in the rain, maybe 2am at this point, staring at a few inches of iron gate that are separating me from the end of one of the most ridiculous, harrowing, frustrating, nerve-wracking days of my life. I need to find a way to open this gate. Is there an intercom system, or some kind of--
--and then the gate. Opens.
Salvation
I waste not a moment. I sprint back to the Beast, jump in the driver’s seat, peel out, and drive that sucker straight through that gate and up the hill. I park. I run inside.
The nice man behind the desk does not speak a word of English. But he knows who I am and what I’m there for. We check in. We carry sleeping girls and our luggage up to our rooms. I park the Beast in the hotel’s covered garage, where neither rain nor thief can ruin anything further.
The heavy garage doors slowly close behind me, shutting in my many mistakes and terrible fortune of this day, covering them up and giving me the chance to try again tomorrow.
Well, today, technically, because at this point it’s pushing 3am.
I drag myself upstairs where my mother is waiting with my sleeping kids for me. I send her out, check on the girls, and crawl into bed. I set my alarm so I can get a jump on the next morning instead of the other way around.
