Studying in Florence now for three months, I have traveled in and out of and experienced the every day travel mistakes that college study abroad students make all the time. A learning obstacle for the lucky of us, I can now say that I am an ever learning European traveler. One of my greatest adventures has been a 48 hour stay in Paris , where a debacle of sorts amassed and gave me the greatest encouragement that my traveling experiences could only improve as my semester went on!

Some friends of my program and I decided to take a trip to Paris on our free weekend from school. We bought a cheap flight and decided that we would run around Paris and make the most of it because we only had about 48 hours to do so! We were feeling on top of the world on our way back to the airport Sunday night when we realized we accomplished Montmartre , the Eiffel Tower , the Louvre, Notre Dame, Moulin Rouge, and still had time to see the famous singer, Jim Morrison’s grave site. I couldn’t wait to tell our friends back home that Paris is possible in such a small amount of time.

When we arrived at the airport we stared at the departures screen for a good ten minutes searching for our flight back to Pisa , where we would catch a bus from there to Florence . Continually we searched, and then pulled out our itineraries to double check our flight information. The color in all our faces dropped as all five of us realized that we scheduled our flight for 9:30, and not 21:30. None of us could believe that we didn’t consider military time, and wondered how we could naturally assume it was p.m. when we had been in for a month!

The unenthused woman at the airport counter informed us that we could buy tickets to fly into Rome , but that the flight would be for 9:30 (in the morning, haha), and that it would be 104 Euro. All of us sucked it up, realizing that there was no other way out and charged our credit cards to what we knew would be almost 200 dollars in.

At this point, the chocolate, candy, and other airport shop goodies were calling my name where I indulged in my feel-good guilty pleasure. Hanging out and deciding that we would just have to sleep in the airport until the morning, we decided that this was probably as bad as it could get, but it slowly turned into one of those “worst case scenario” situations. The woman from the counter then informed us that the airport would be closing and we couldn’t stay. Luckily, a shuttle bus! We hopped on in route for the closest hotel…45 minutes away. “Formula 1” gave us 2 hotel rooms for 30 Euro a night, affordable for the situation we were in, not to mention at this point we didn’t care, as long as we didn’t have to huddle in the cold outside.

In the morning we took the shuttle bus back to the airport and made it to our plane. Landing back in , I could have kissed the ground! Luckily, we were able to credit our bus tickets from our original trip back to Florence to our new trip to the train station and then the only thing left to pay for was the train ticket. The four hour ride on the train back to Florence was long and we were looking pretty much in shambles at this point, but we couldn’t help but laugh at this point about the ridiculous trip we had. It may have been a tiring and expensive adventure at the time, but it is one traveling excursion I can look back on and have a good laugh!