Day 6 - Heading for Home

Early in the morning we broke camp and headed to the train station in Trieste. The way down from the hill was in stark contrast to the way up, as it was pure pleasure - due to the incline we didn't need to pedal at all, the pavement surface was new and smooth without any potholes, and as it was still early in the morning there was hardly any traffic. While on the evening before we had struggled for more than an hour, we now arrived after a 15-minute ride at the train station, feeling refreshed. We treated ourselves to a coffee and croissants and found our train coach for the first leg of our journey back home - from Trieste to Venezia, where we got another chance to see the Adriatic Sea pass us by.

In Venezia we changed trains - the next one would take us to Verona - which was stressful as we didn't know how the "bike situation" would be and unlike in Trieste we only had a short time window to board the train and get settled. On top of that, we started to regret to be traveling on a Saturday, as the train station in Venezia was bustling with people, unlike the quiet and placid Trieste (though maybe this was also due to the time of day).
Unfortunately, not only the train station was packed with people, but the train, too! We had a hard time even getting on the train (although the trains themselves were very comfortable - with a low floor and a "bike station" to just park them, without having to hang them up), in fact, it was so crowded that the doors almost wouldn't close. We had bought a ticket specifically for the bikes, but the bike station was already full - not with other people's bikes in that case, but with huge suitcases that exacerbated the whole misery. On the next station, we switched train coach, but the situation was hardly any better; we were glad that the total train ride was only an hour!Read more