Cat in the track

To quote Dr. Seuss:

"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple"

Likewise sometimes the travel seems complicated but arriving is simple!

So was the case for our trip to Austria. After we mapped out a typically tight travel schedule that had us traveling from Aachen to Mannhiem to catch a night train to Vienna... we ended up sitting on tracks somewhere between Cologne and Mannheim for almost two hours without moving an inch. Never mind that they didn't seem to understand that we had a transfer to make and had already booked our sleeping arrangements on the overnight train to Vienna! After about an hour of going nowhere we finally found out from a conductor that the police were investigating some accident on the tracks ahead, and we would just have to wait until they cleared the way. When we asked about what we could do about missing our train, the answer was to catch one in the morning. Any suggestions about a place to stay, given that we were going to arrive in an unknown town after 1AM in the morning? The response was a shrug, I guess it wasn't a good night for the train employees either :).

Some time later the train finally started up, and we were trying to figure out what to do. Here enters our hero, Tom Rigg, who got a frantic call from us on our cell phone (with waning battery) about our delayed train, missed connection, and soon to be late night arrival in a strange city with nowhere to stay. Ten minutes later we called back and he had found a Ramada less then 200 yards from the train station, what a guy!

When we did finally arrive in the station, we wandered over to check out when the next train would be in the morning... only to find notice on the main board that the train to Vienna was also severely delayed, and would be arriving in ten minutes! Needless to say, we were quite thrilled that we would be able to get into bed in our reserved spots... and arrive in Vienna by morning -- something we were sure would have been impossible only a few minutes earlier. You can see the time (almost 1:30AM), the sign for our delayed train, and Julianna showing how tired we were!
















Filled with relief, we headed back to the platform and waited for our train to arrive, stumbled into our beds (trying to not wake the others we shared the compartment with), and quickly fell asleep after quite the experience. Luckily we didn't need the hotel Tom found, but felt pretty good about the advantages of modern technology these days (cell phone call from Germany to Seattle, hotel reservation in Germany over the Internet from Seattle, two relieved people in Germany!)

The next morning we found out the train we eventually caught (headed to Vienna) had hit a cat, and the police had to be called out to investigate and be sure it wasn't a person or something else. The accident caused all the trains behind it to stand still (including the one we were on), resulting in quite a mess for all the trains involved. We got off the train, 'somewhat' well rested, and headed out for a day in Vienna!