Wow! It was time for our first weekend trip where Caroline and I would be traveling more or less completely alone. We were very responsible about it, checking train schedules, checking our flight frequently, printing boarding passes etc. We also knew that if we missed one of our trains... we absolutely would NOT make it to the airport in time to catch our flight.
We took the first train after class to get out of Maastricht and to Liege. Liege is a city in Belgium where we go for pretty much any train that we we want to take. Then we took a train from Liege to Brussels. We had 5 minutes to get off the train in Brussels Central, find the correct platform and get on a new train to Brussels Airport. We did it! We made it to our new train and we were both feeling pretty proud of ourselves too. FALSE. As the train we were on pulled away, we saw a sign out the window pointing to a DIFFERENT train that said airport. We quickly realized that we were on the WRONG TRAIN. Caroline and I both freaked and took a deep breath. I asked the couple sitting next to us if they spoke English and thank goodness one of them did! The man told us where the heck this train was going and how long it would take. It was going to Louvain. So I started frantically searching new trains to see if we could possibly catch another one and it was a miracle! There was a train that would get us to the airport 10 minutes before our gate closed.
We got on the new train in Louvain and finally made it to the airport. Unfortunately we were THOSE people. You know those people that sprint through the airport, pushing anyone in their way? Yeah that was us. We convinced the security people to let us skip the lines and we RAN to our gate just in time to catch our flight to Barcelona!
It was a pretty stressful travel day but God sure was looking out for us!
Love,
MTW