the adventures just keep coming

Well, I gave you all a few hours to get caught up on the main events from Taize. Do none of you comment ever? Did a tsunami take you all out? honestly. We're still having trouble with the photo uploading situation, but don't worry, we haven't given up.

But we can't sit around waiting for that to happen, because there are more adventures to tell!

We left Taize yesterday morning, got a ride with a Swiss youth group to a little town called Tournus, where my (Heather's) grandfather ran an orphanage after the 2nd world war. There wasn't much to see there, because it was Sunday and all, but we wandered around and ate lunch by the river and felt sorry for ourselves that Taize was over.

At 4:23 we boarded a train, confident we could make it to Modane, the train station on the French-Italian border, in time to catch a night train to Rome. However, by the time we were transferring trains in Chambery around 8:30, I noticed that we seemed to be in the French Alps, and it seemed to be pretty remote and quiet up there. Beautiful, but quiet. As our train stopped at tiny station after tiny station, it occurred to me that Modane might not be quite the thriving metropolis that I had assumed it was.

Indeed, it was not.

We got off the train at 9:48 and were greeted by an empty platform, utterly deserted except for the dozen other travellers disembarking with us. Sure enough, there were no more trains arriving or leaving Modane that night. Well, we thought, hopefully hotels here aren't too expensive.

We walked outside to find a completely dark street, except for one sketchy looking hotel sign, with a bar for a lobby, and 5 or 6 men sitting inside, watching us walk by. We decided to follow the signs to centre-ville, hoping there would be a more inviting place downtown.

An hour and a half later, we had wandered most of the streets of the town, which was even more dead than that first road outside the train station. We had considered asking some paramedics we had seen doing a drill for directions, but didn't quite like the idea of walking up to a bunch of men in a dark empty street, even if they were in uniform.

We decided to return to that first hotel, but found it also deserted when we got there. By this time, it was almost midnight, and the first train out of Modane (back into France, but still a way out of this cold and awful place) was at 5:38AM.

We decided to sleep outside the train station.

It provided some shelter, we reasoned, with enough light ot see what was going on around us without drawing attention to ourselves, and it was right next to the police station should any trouble arise. Great! We pulled out our sleeping bags and pillows, leaned agaisnt our bags and got settled. Michelle was able to sleep quite quickly, but between my vague fear of getting yelled at by police or train station personnel, and the apparent inferiority of my sleeping bag, (one sign said it was 9 degrees back at 10 pm, so it must have been colder by now), it took me at least an hour to doze off.

Around 2:30 I realized that now was the time to make use of the long underwear I brought along, and that made a big difference. Still, we both woke up about every half hour or so until about five when we packed up our stuff and went into the station, washing our faces and brushing our teeth in the washroom, and charging iPods in the waiting room.

We got on a bus at 7:30 that took us through a 10km long tunnel through the mountain, and we emerged on the other side, in Italy, where we boarded a train to Turin. We had breakfast in Turin, lunch in Milan, and we just had dinner in Rome.

Don't worry, we have a hotel room tonight.

Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about our new roommate...