Where do I even begin this story. Back in 2005 as I was preparing to leave for Navy OCS (Officer Candidate School), I decided to spend some time traveling. I had a good friend, Emma, who was based in Sicily so my dad donated the frequent flier miles... and away I went for a 12 day trip to Italy.
Keep in mind we were both single and not into planning (something I'm not sure I can still claim)... so we caught an overnight train to Rome with no plans of where we were going or how long we were staying. Are you cringing yet? The only thing set was we had 1 week before Emma had to be back at work. This was me on the train to Rome. Yeah, we're breaking out the archives here. Yes my hair was somewhat blonde and I was SUPER tan after spending 10 days in Hawaii :) Oh how I miss the days of having a tan... but I digress.
That little bag on the bed with me, was the ONLY bag I took with me to Rome! This is a point I'm extremely proud of! The bag was only 14" long! I couldn't fit my toiletries in that any longer. How did we make that work? We each packed 2 shirts and we swapped shirts.
We were hopscotching our way home with a stay in Naples. We left Naples in the evening, planning on catching the overnight train back to Sicily. While we were waiting at the train station in Naples the local Policia saw us sitting there and told us it was not safe for us to be sitting there alone. Fabulous. He offered to let us come stay in the Security Office. Yup, I have the picture to prove it! The were nice folks and we were just thankful for a warm place to wait for the train.
We departed Naples and had to switch trains in Salerno. No big deal, right? Wrong. The schedule was confusing so we asked a Policia which train we needed to be on... he gave us bad gouge and we ended up missing our train. Now, I will say the train stations in Italy are beautiful and made of marble... not a bad place to be stranded for the night, right? We settled into a corner and snuggled in on each other trying to stay warm because that marble floor can really suck the warmth out of your body!
When we woke we discovered the local homeless population also likes sleeping in the train station. Okay... homeless people, no big deal and it wasn't... until they saw that we had food. Suddenly we're surrounded by 2-3 homeless people. We're still sitting on the floor and they're standing over us speaking very angrily in Italian. Emma tells me they want our food... and by this point I'm getting nervous. I told my friend to give me the word and I would take out their knee caps (and YES, I was so serious! I had spent the past 7 months having a trainer kick my butt so I had no doubt I could take them down and out run the rest of them). We somehow mangaged to extract ourselves from that situation and went wandering down the street to a local Bar that I found earlier. This just keeps getting better, right? No. In Italy a Bar is a coffee house. I'm very relived to tell you after 2-3 hours in the Bar we finally caught our train and arrived back in Sicily... with the memory of the night we slept with the hobos in an Italian train station.
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