Shitnal Railway Station

[Edited] We’re back from boarding in Passo Tonale – what a great time. Perfect conditions, great company, hellish neighbours, disastrous trains and a 26kg snowboard bag !

Hope to have the DVD in stores by the end of the month. It took 24hrs to get to the resort (38 hrs awake) and 12 hrs to get home. Eish… Long story… Good thing V took the time to write it up – I just edited. Boring trip drama after the break.

Whenever V and I have travelled with that board bag we have endless bad luck with trains. We had pre-booked train tickets for Friday night to get us to T&V’s place in London by 23h30. We sat waiting at Shifnal Station (read platform with no ticket office and a broken intercom) for an hour – the train never came –  meaning that we missed our connections to London. Frantic phone calls to friends to check on the net about the train schedules told us that the next train was also cancelled for some reason.

We had to make a new plan. Phoned a taxi…nope not working tonight…phoned 2 people we know from V’s work…not answering. Eventually we went into one of the local pubs and got a number for a taxi operator that would take us to Wolverhampton (amazing how a board bag fits into a car if you apply enough pressure). Having missed our pre booked train, and now being too late to get to Raynes park before the trains shut down at 2am, we landed up forking out £50 each for a ticket to Gatwick. We were in for a very long night.

View from our apartment in Tonale - Stunning !

After a frustrating trip with nosiy, inconsiderate passengers we arrived in London at 1am to find the tube had stopped for the night. We had to take the night bus to Victoria station where we found out that our tickets do not cover the bus. The ticket inspector was very decent and instead of fining us £25 each he took some money off of us, stopped the bus and went and bought us 2 tickets.. and we got a little lecture for free.  We arrived at Victoria station at 2minutes to 2am just as they were closing  up the station (yes they close from 2am-4am – was news to us !), but they let us in and we ran for the last train. A 400m (felt like it) sprint with a 26kg snowboard bag is NOT fun.

Around 3am we eventually arrived at Gatwick, checked in and then proceeded to wait at the airport while our flight was delayed for 6 hours due to technical difficulties. You know you are zombie tired when food makes you feel alive for about 10 minutes before you crash again ! Good training for RTW/2 I suppose. A motion-sickeness inducing (for V) bus transfer was waiting for us in Brescia and 24 hours after we left home we were settled in Passo Tonale !

[Insert post about the ‘fun’ part of the trip. More on the snowboarding and the other fun bits. Got plenty video to edit thanks to T’s video camera. Some photos in the gallery – more to follow. ]

On the return journey, the flight was actually early, but our pre-booked ticket was only for the 7:30pm train out of London. Well, we didn’t want to wait at the station for 6 hours, so we forked out yet more money and got an earlier train. At least we were home and eating takeaway fish and chips by 6.

Crazy but..

• Return Flight to Italy + 7 Nights Accomodation + Bus Transfer to Tonale +  6 Day Lift Pass:  £330
• UK Trains (Tks London Midland – next time go around the obstacle on the track) : £105 !!!
• New gear for snowboarding: Too embarressing to publish but 26kg is a lot of snazzy gear.

Travel Lessons Learned

• Travel Light
• Cheap advanced tickets are not so cheap
• Trains get lost too
• Earplugs !