So we were supposed to fly from Barcelona to Prague on Friday to meet up with Dana's family who were flying in Monday. I'd booked the tickets months before when we put the whole plan in place.

Well, as fate would have it, the day before we were scheduled to fly, the ground staff of Iberia airlines blocked the runways at El Prat airport and effectively shut down the airport.

We'd seen the strike on the late news at Paula & Ivan's the night before, but we didn't have any other option but to head over there the next day. Once we arrived, we realized that Spanish TV had downplayed the magnitude of the problem. The airport was a complete disaster area. Like almost-post-hurricane disaster area. We stayed only long enough to (1) grab sandwiches and water from the first aid workers giving them to the thousands of people camped out on the floors, benches and every other foot of available space in the airport and (2) find out our plane had been diverted to Girona Airport the day before and (3) NO ONE was going ANYWHERE from El Prat for a very long time.(Indeed, we were supposed to leave on Saturday,the day after the strike and things were still screwed on Monday, the day we were supposed to be in Prague.

So Dana & I took matters into our own hands. We took off to the train station to travel overland to Prague. Simple, right? WRONG. The train station was jammed with people doing the exact same thing -- trying to find alternatives to their flights. Plus the Barcelona train station was like being in a DMV. We literally waited in line for HOURS just to have the ticket lady "Oh no, you need to stand in THAT line to get your itinerary" before gesturing to the other end of the station.

Standing in THAT line, we were reduced to just picking random cities in France and Italy and Switzerland which might have trains to them in the next 12 hours. Then we had to take those schedules to the OTHER line to see if there was open space. And there NEVER was. It was awful. We finally got a hit with a combination of five different trains which got us to Zurich, Switzerland the next day. This after four hours in the train station. Except that for some reason in the middle of the booking, the Spanish ticket lady couldn't get us there -- she could only book tickets to Lyon, France and we'd have to plan from there. We were just happy to leave Barcelona.


So we left Barcelona at 7pm Saturday taking a train to Cerebere, Spain then Marseille, France then finally to Lyon, France at around 8am Sunday morning. The second leg, from Cerebere to Marseille, we were lucky enough to have these lovely couchette sleeping beds. They were the best seats we'd get the rest of the way. We had them from 12am to 5am Saturday night.

In Lyon, we stood in line and finally got tickets to Prague itself, via Paris and Frankfurt. We took the superfast-and-extremely-expensive TGV to Paris, then had back-to-back eight hour trains from Paris to Frankfurt, then Frankfurt to Prague. Plus the train to Frankfurt left from a different station in Paris. This then turned our 50 minute layover into a full-out barefoot sprint through the streets of gay Paree in the pouring rain looking for missing bus shuttles before finally racing into the metro and barely making it by minutes. Then our connection to Prague had a 10 minute layover, just enough to walk off one train and on to another. On top of all this, we only had unreserved tickets. Which means we were left scavenging for seats together as we walked on. In short, it was awful.


We made it to Prague at around 8am monday morning, sharing the last hour of our ride with commuters. One old woman yelled at me for having my feet on the seats. I could have bludgeoned her with her handbag. We'd been almost constantly moving since Saturday at 7pm. Any possible chance to be more comfortable and I was taking it. She could take her train rules and shove them up her a**. But I didn't speak Czech and I didn't have one spare ounce of energy. So I put my feet on the floor. Of course.

After a few hours of wandering the streets and subways of Prague, we found Penzion Louda and the sweet bliss of their best room. It was heaven on Earth. The whole debacle ended up costing about four times what the original Barca-Prague ticket cost. But it was worth it. It was Monday and Dana's family was coming in the next day. Time to explore Prague!