Overnight Train to Croatia

After an amazing two days in Venice, it was time to make our way over to Croatia to visit Brian’s family (more on that part of the trip tomorrow). In the meantime, though, I had to write about the trip there. Venice is so close to Croatia that there isn’t a flight between the two – the best way is to go by train. Being the smart, economical travelers that we are, we thought “Great, we’ll do an overnight train there to avoid a night of hotel cost.” Brian thought the trip was fine, but I’m pretty sure that’s the last time Crystal or I will do an overnight train…

It was so hot in Italy, and I was worried about not having A/C on the train – sure enough, when it pulled in, we saw that it just had windows that you could put down. Brian convinced me this was better because there would be good airflow and the air would be cool at night. As we made our way to our car though, we realized that we actually had an “air conditioned” compartment without any windows. The compartment was off of a hallway on the train and had 6 seats, 3 on each side facing each other. Brian got on the train first to get the A/C going. He told me it was getting cooler, but when I got on the train 15 minutes later, the cabin was still really hot. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make 9 hours – luckily, we did have a portable mini-fan that Brian set up for me to make it more bearable. The sign on the door to our compartment specifically said to keep the door closed to make the A/C work the best. But when Crystal got up about 1 ½ hours into the train ride, she noticed that the hallway was much cooler and had better airflow. So we finally opened the door, which made a HUGE difference. In fact, by the middle of the night, we were all so cold we had to wear sweaters!

When traveling from Italy to Croatia, you cross through Slovenia and then into Croatia, which is not part of the European Union. As a result, we went through a few passport checks, which were pretty unsettling experiences. The first time, we were pulling into a station when I had the brilliant idea to go to the bathroom. As I was there, we stopped and all of a sudden, someone was trying to open the door and yelling at me in a language I didn’t understand. I opened the door to find out what was going on, and it was an officer demanding to see my passport which was back with Brian in the compartment. He was not happy! A few hours later, we had turned off the lights in our compartment and were half-sleeping when a large group of officers came on the train at another stop. An officer came to our compartment, switched on the bright light, and demanded to see our passports again (we still didn’t understand the language, but the message was clear enough!) Finally, after numerous ticket checks throughout the night and not a lot of sleeping, we pulled into Koprivnica, Croatia…