Day 17: Dole

Stuck in Dole for 4 hours...
see all photos »

So, this entry will be really short.  Why, you ask?  Simple.  This whole day we were in transit, and we would have put it as a "dual" blog with day 18, but then we wouldn't  have had Dole as a marker on our map!  We left Zermatt today at around 2:30 p.m.  We took a train from Zermatt to Visp, then from Visp to Lausanne.  From Lausanne, we had to go to Dole.  If you happen to be reading this and are looking at a map, then you may have realized that Dole is way back in France.  We know.  It was incredibly hard finding a train from Zermatt straight into Italy without crossing over into Austria and our Eurail passes just didn't cover Austria.  So to save money, we headed into Dole and caught a connecting train to Italy.  Now, a little about Dole.  It's VERY little.  Small-town French people just staring at these two foreigners in the smallest town in the smallest train station.  We had to wait at Dole for FOUR hours!  It all worked out though.  Our train from Dole to Venice was an overnight train so we ended up sleeping really well.  Too bad we don't have pictures of the couchette we slept in on the train.  A couchette has 6 bunk beds (3 on each side of the room) in one compartment.  TJ slept on one side of the compartment on the middle bunk.  Melissa slept on the other side on the middle bunk.  We would have taken pictures except that people were already asleep when we boarded the train (they came from Paris).  That was a super fun experience.  As weirdly uncomfortable as it was, the couchettes were good enough to get a really great night's sleep in so we were refreshed for our arrival in Venice the next day....

Venice to come