Please click on one of the photos – it will make for much more pleasant viewing!

On Saturday morning we went up to Lake Como for the day. It’s a 1 ½ hour trip by train to the north to the little town of Varenna. We walked four blocks to the Metro (subway) station and found it quick and easy to use. We took the Metro up to Milano Centrale, the main railroad station.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Milano Centrale is a bit overwhelming for me. It is so big and so crowded that I get nervous just walking through it. We needed round-trip tickets, and working together (this is a great group!) we found a ticket office with actual humans in it. We got to the front of the line fairly quickly and I asked for seven return fares to Varenna. The ticket seller asked “Seven?” (they always do) and I confirmed. The man began a long, involved operation that required him, for each ticket, to go through the same sequence of about 10 mouse clicks. Then he had to tear off 14 blank tickets, individually, from a perforated stack of them. Each ticket had to be hand-fed into a small ink-jet printer. Some of them came out crooked. This naturally took a long time but he was very efficient, having done this a few times before. His actions were accompanied by a running commentary about the inefficiencies of the Italian computer systems and the corruption of the government, illustrated by appropriate hand-into-pocket motions.

I asked him where to catch the train but the reply came so fast I couldn’t understand it. We had already taken a long time so I didn’t want to keep asking. I figured we’d find it.

We went up to the trains and tried to figure it out. Of course each train route has many stops, and the route is identified by the last city on it. Of course we had no way of knowing where our train was going after Varenna. I checked Google Maps on my phone and tried to guess. We picked a train and attempted to get on it but we weren’t fast enough and it took off. We encountered a railroad employee and showed him our tickets. He informed us that the train we missed was not what we wanted anyway – we wanted Tirano.

We checked the board and found Tirano on another track, and boarded the train. After sitting down my brain began to play “telephone” and I became convinced that we were headed for Turino – known to us Americans as Turin. Turin is east of Milan, not north. The train had no maps or signs in it (unlike trains in Switzerland which are full of helpful information) to indicate where we were going or how we were going to get there.

I have Rick Steves’ Italy book on Kindle on my iPhone and I began to read it. I showed a map of Lake Como to Steve and he read on the next page that many people confused Tirano with Turino. This is why I like Rick Steves – he knows what I am going to experience!

Lake Como was as beautiful as expected, and we had a great time until the end of the day when it appeared that we would not be able to catch a train back. (That misinformation turned out to be caused by an Internet outage – which just goes to show that you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Who knew?) But we made it back, and had an excellent dinner in a restaurant next door to our hotel.