Summer Sizzles

Today we had an adventure. Since we had two extra days in Budapest we decided to take a day trip- to Vienna. We took a train there and had no idea what to see or do. So after randomly finding the most famous church we headed down to the opera house, saw the parliament, got tired touring the fine art museum, then headed to a huge palace and gardens. The day was amazing. It was near perfect, in fact my cousin decided to say that it was the “perfect day” without knocking on wood. Big mistake. So after a wonderful sit at a café we headed to catch the 5.50 train back to Budapest. We get to the train station and find our train with 5 minutes to spare. Then I heard some girls speaking Bulgarian and I decided to chat with them. After a few seconds of chit-chat they said, “Oh good, we’re all going to Germany!” and I said, “Uh, no we’re going to Budapest…wait. Where does this train go?” And then we discovered we were on the wrong train. So we jump off with stuff in hands and 2 minutes until our train leaves. Luckily (or perhaps not so luckily) the Budapest train was right across from ours. So we ran into it and sighed, just then a man came up to us and kicked us off the train and told us to go further up. So we walked two or three cars up the train and got in again. Feeling very secure in our situation we actually sat down… then two boys ran through the train yelling something ending in “get off the train” in German. I caught their frantic spirit and rushed to get off the train, Chloe trailing behind me very confused until another man got on the train and said, “Follow me to Budapest!” This made us laugh and we followed. Then we realized that the train we were supposed to be on was in front/behind the train we had been on before and we had one minute to run to it. Finally we got on the right train and found seats and breathed a deep breath and went to take out the train tickets… which were nowhere to be found. As I tell Chloe that I can’t find our tickets she says, “Ha ha, good joke.” Then as I start to freak out she realizes it’s not a joke. After discussion of who will stay on the train, who will keep the bags, how much time we have, what we will do if we can’t find these tickets, and so forth we both get off the train. We decide the tickets must be somewhere on the second train we mistakenly got on, because I remembered grabbing them off the first. We run back to the train and it’s locked, but there was a conductor there who, after a brief explanation, unlocked it and let us look. We looked up, we looked down, we looked side-to-side, we looked back to front then front to back, we split up to look… then a worker found me and said I had to get off the train because it was leaving for maintenance in a couple minutes. Chloe was nowhere to be seen. As the guy asked me if I found the tickets I jumped off the train and shouted, “No! and my friend’s still on the train!” We ran down the train looking in the windows and finally found Chloe and motioned to her to get off the train right then. After reconnecting and realizing neither of us had found the tickets we resigned ourselves to buy new ones, and just as we did another workman (that bring the total number of workmen helping/following us up to 4) started walking towards us with something in his hand. Then he held them up and ta-da! It was our tickets. The man received his daily allotment of hugs in the five seconds following. We were so relived and happy, and then realized our train had left. Luckily the next train was only an hour later…and 20 degrees hotter with no a/c. But we have finally arrived at our hotel safe, sound, and full of adventure.