The Midnight Train to Venice (sort of)

We are such seasoned train passengers now, it's like we've been living on the trains all our lives. We actually did on Friday night. The heavens are definitely pouring more than just rain on us. When we went to the Munich train station Friday morning we had to book reservations for the night train to Venice that night. It's not usually possible to get accommodations that don't involve sharing a berth with less than four strangers and the one bathroom with an entire car of sleeping berths. I think we got very lucky because the German man working at the English information desk, has been to and apparently liked the time he spent in Utah. All the sleeping berths were mostly full on the straight line to Venice, so he searched found us a three-man berth that included its own bathroom. All we had to do was take the train past Venice to Bologna and switch to local train that would back track to Venice at 6am. We had to be off our train at 4:30am and wait a bit, but it was TOTALLY WORTH IT! No one booked the third bed in our berth so we were on our own. I only had to share my bathroom with Rach. We slept on tiny bunks, I don't even know how they could get a third bunk in there, but I'm sure they do. It's a little like sleeping in a really tiny RV. The beds aren't really comfortable, but it's better than trying to sleep in a regular train seat. Rach has tried that out a couple of times with little success. I haven't bothered since I don't really sleep that much in my own bed. Our conductor was really nice and gave us boxed breakfasts before we got off (not for free, I'm sure it was part of our first class stuff, but he didn't have to since we were the only ones getting off the train. I was a little bit unsure about spending nights on the train, but it worked out well and cost us a lot less than a hotel and saved the time between two places that would have been wasted on a train anyway. We were in a car full of what I am guessing were very wealthy American and British women on a tour group. Many of them were dressed really nice and had gigantic suitcases that they could barely lift onto the train. The tiniest, skinniest women in the group was lifting everyone's cases in for them. It was sort of funny. We were able to get some sleep, even with the cheerful,. talkative women in the car most of the night. There really was a tiny shower stall, but we didn't use it since it didn't seem to drain well.