Word of the day: un incubo - a nightmare

Che un incubo!
What a nightmare!

So I’m going to retell the my whole trip backwards because that’s what is freshest in my mind.  So Sunday was a travel day from Amsterdam back to Firenze and it was an incubo!  I was flying Ryan Air (the cheap air line i.e. 15 euro ticket) from Eindhoven to Pisa.  In an effort to cut costs, Ryan air and often Easy Jet, usually don’t fly into real airports.  They fly into obscure airports an hour away from where you really want to go.  But since its only 15 euros, and with added travel expenses maybe 45 euros to go from Amsterdam to Florence it’s usually worth the money.  So anyway, we (myself, the other Nick, and Phil) leave the hotel at 7:30 to catch the tram to Amsterdam’s main station.  From there, we catch the 1.5 hour train from Amsterdam to Eindhoven.  And after that we catch the bus from Eindhoven Centraal to Eindhoven’s airport.  As a bonus, the ticket machine in the bus was broken and the bus driver told us not to worry about buying tickets, so that was nice.  Anyway so we arrive at the airport around 10:30 and our flight is at 12:30.  So we arrive with plenty of time to spare and there’s even a foosball table and gamecube with Mario Kart double dash to occupy our time. 

So believe it or not Ryan Air’s flight was late to board by around 20 minutes.  Although they say over 90% of their flights are on time, in my experience they are only 4/6 for being on time.  And they kept on having last calls for a flight provided by Wiz air.  So that’s just a silly name for a plane company.  But that’s neither here nor there.  We take off late out of Eindhoven and then it was too windy in Pisa for us to land.  The wind speed at the airport was around 90 km/h and our plane is only allowed to land in wind speeds of up to 60km/h.  And there was a large group of rowdy obnoxious Italians who were yelling during all the announcements and generally being annoying during the entire flight.  So we had to get diverted to Genova.  Which usually wouldn’t be a big deal, but we don’t get to go to Genova, we get to sit on the tarmac for an hour waiting for the winds in Pisa to die down.  So this was a bummer.  And of course, the wind makes the turbulence extra exciting while landing.  I over heard the person behind me say she loves turbulence because it’s like an invisible roller coaster.  I think she was trying to stay optimistic, but I’m not really sure.  So we eventually get to take off again and we get to land in Pisa around 5pm instead of 2pm.  But we made it!  But, of course, things are more exciting in Pisa.  We catch the train from the airport to the train station and that’s when it gets even more annoying.  Yesterday there was a huge train strike and about ¾ of all the trains going through Pisa were cancelled.  So instead of waiting for 10 minutes for a train we had to wait an hour.  I was so nervous because all the trains that were still “running” because a bunch were being delayed by 5 minutes, and then 10 minutes, and then 40 minutes.  Anyway, they decided not to act all funny on the 6:30 train to Florence SMN so we jumped on that one and we only arrived in Florence at 7:30pm.  So that’s a solid 12 hours of sitting/travelling.  Che un incubo!