There is truly never a dull moment on the race. Travel days are certainly no
exception. Imagine this…
You are in transit, for 60 hours in fact! That’s right 60 hours on a train or
waiting in a train station. Your
hitting somewhere around the hour 40 mark and have just woken up. You think to yourself, “I wonder what
my other friends are doing?� The teammates in your car are asleep, so you decide to make a visit to the next car
over where the other half of the two teams you are traveling with are residing
for the long trek from Ukraine to Romania. Sleepily, you jump off of your bed fastened 5 feet up the
wall and stumble towards the next car over, hoping that someone else is awake
to hang out with you. You reach
for the door at the end of the car but you stop dead in your tracks, trying to
take in the sight you are seeing.
Looking out the window in the back of the car, you see nothing but
tracks whizzing by. Your friends are missing! Their train car is gone. How can this be? It must have detached during the night? Where are they now? Are they ok? How can we get a hold of them when they are carrying our
only cell phones?
This is EXACTLY what happened to me just 4 weeks ago. I immediately began to form a plan in
my head. We would find free
internet upon arrival in Bucharest, I would skype the AIM emergency number,
they would call our friends, and we would form a plan and go from there.
I decided to go find the conductor to try and get to the
bottom of this. Of coarse NO ONE
speaks English. Then I realized we
had been in the very front of the train and now there were more cars ahead of
us. This didn’t seem right. I began to walk forward, car after
car. What do you know, 8 cars
later I FOUND MY FRIENDS!!! They
had no idea, just like the rest of us, that in the middle of the night while we
went through customs they had to switch the wheels on the train due to
differences between the tracks in other countries. In the process, the order of the cars got switched
around. Crisis averted!! Whew!
All that to say, you never quite know what you are going to
get on the world race! It’s full
of random moments and big adventures.
These are the little things that happen constantly that I often forget
to share with you. Oh, the funny
and obscure life of a world racer.
Below is a video of even more randomness on a train just a few days
ago!! Enjoy 🙂
