This past week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to travel across Europe for my spring break and my birthday. There are innumerable positive events which occurred — from visiting Pompeii to seeing the pope to eating lots and lots of gelato — but, like any trip, we also encountered some hiccups. The most major of these hiccups (knock on wood, as I stand in line here at the airport) transpired as we attempted to catch a train from Rome to Rimini. A series of circumstances led us to arrive at Termini with only ten minutes until our train was departing. Despite our best intentions in splitting up to collect various luggage, my friend Cara and I were split up from our friend Rose. We experienced a severe, frustrating delay in retrieving our baggage from the left luggage at the station, and consequently, despite running through the station, arrive at the platforms after our train had already departed. While this would have already been a problem, it was even more of an issue because we could no longer find our friend Rose. Rose had stayed behind to pay our taxi fare, so we had separated, and now was nowhere in sight. Unlike Cara and me, she didn’t have an international texting plan, so we had no way to immediately contact her. Also, because we had missed the train, it wasn’t up on the board, so Cara and I didn’t know which track it had departed on to check if she was in its immediate vicinity. After I ran and checked left luggage and Cara waited by the platform, we decided to establish a course of action. By connecting to the sketchy terminal wifi, I was able to message Rose, but also establish that she hadn’t been online since the time the train had departed. The combination of the timing of her last online activity and the lack of message from her (because I was certain that if she could connect to wifi her first move would have been to try and contact us) led me to believe that she had sprinted to the train and boarded it, believe us to already be on board since we had gone ahead. Cara and I then checked when the next train left from Rome to Bologna, where we had a connection. We had 7 minutes to make a final decision if we were going to board the only possible train that would allow us to make our connection. After stressfully rehashing our options, and again noting that 1) if Rose had been in Rome she probably would have contacted us by now and 2) recalling that I had noted in the cab ride as a last resort that we could just try and make our connection in Bologna, we decided that the logical best move would be to buy that ticket and board the train, but we did so under a huge feeling of uncertainty and stress, unsure if we were leaving our friend behind in Rome with no money and no luggage. Luckily we did make the right call as Rose was waiting there.
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