Italy Part 1: Making it out of France

"We would like to reserve two tickets to Torino leaving today at 12:15 from Paris."

The lady at the train station ticket window stared at me with the you-complete-idiot look and said "This is the vacations. All the trains to Italy are full. You should have reserved weeks ago. Today is impossible." "And tomorrow?" "Complete" "Monday?" "Okay there's a train Monday but it leaves at 6 am and you have to wait in Chambery for 5 hours."

And it was even more trouble getting a train back from Italy. (Should have just stayed there)

Anyway, that was the start of my vacation with Sarah. We sheepishly went back to Valenciennes, surprised my roommates, and rearranged our hotel situation.

Monday morning, we had to catch the train leaving at 4:39 am to catch our next one at 6 am in Lille. As if waking up at 3:30 am isn't difficult enough, daylight savings time didn't reset on my phone, and I woke us up at 2:30 am. Whoops.

Four Dutch people rode on the train to Lyon next to us. They were way too chatty for the morning. In fact, the one with a stammer never stopped talking. This was rough because (1) we couldn't sleep and (2) we couldn't eavesdrop. It's funny arriving somewhere far away at 9 am. We got the bus to sunny Chambery (an French Alpine town) and sat in the park for 5 hours. What is there to do in a park for such a long time?

Journal. Sketch. People watch. Most looked like they'd rather be skiing. Others included
-a man sleeping on his shoes on a bench
-a passerbyer with a mullet, red shirt and white sneakers
-two people practicing karate, one Asian, one uncoordinated.

Fortunately we got a lot of this on video.

We made it to Torino and our hotel around 9 pm. This was officially a long day.