We are hoping to go from Turin Italy to Lyon France tomorrow but it being the start of a long Easter weekend we heard often It’s not possible, referred to below as INP. In hind sight we should have booked our train earlier rather than waiting for the day before. The hotel suggested that we go to the Fossano train a station to buy the ticket for the next day even though we were dropping the car in Turin. After many hand signals we determine that INP, You can’t buy a ticket from the station that you are not leaving from. (Later we leaned that it is absolutely possible but the clerk just didn’t want to deal with us)
We went back to the hotel to ask the concierge for help booking the train-INP, both classes of the train are sold out. She suggests to us that we consider the bus. Online booking for the bus on our iPad, INP.
No problem we go back to the hotel desk and she helps us call the bus company to grab those four tickets. After 40 min on the phone with a Croatian customer service person, spelling all our names like we are speaking to a four year old and trying 4 different credit cards, INP.
The hotel worker suggests she calls her boss to book our tickets with their card and then bills our room, INP, hotel doesn’t have a card for that purpose.
By now we have disrupted all the gracious hotel people working hard on a solution that will get us on our way, and out of theirs. We do have a fallback solution, we can pay the €600 to drop the car in France, defiantly not our first choice, but a possibility. Being the sturdy travelers that we are, and always looking for a work around, we try one more time to book on a regular computer that one of us had. “Success” says the computer. We most likely got the last four seats that will get us to Leon tomorrow. Our group and the hotel workers are all clapping. Phew, that only took a couple of hours. Time flys when you are having fun in Italy.
Fossano, Italy March 28th 2018