"We should probably order a taxi tonight for tomorrow morning. Just in case," I ventured.
"If we do, it probably won't show up and then we'll miss our train. It's happened to me before," replied my husband in a sure tone. "Can't rely on cab companies."
This was not an argument I felt like having. While I had my misgivings about the wisdom of trying to find a cab in Freiburg at 7 am, I also knew that, if we missed the train, there would be another an hour later, albeit one that meant we would have to change trains once on the way to Frankfurt rather than travelling there directly. That one change was precisely why we had elected to book the earlier train: we had luggage, lots of luggage. I also knew that, if worst came to worst, we could trundle our suitcases the six blocks to catch a streetcar to the station, a trek likely to blacken my mood considerably and destroy my back.
My husband and I had completed a four week what we came to call (post) Covid Friends and Family tour of Germany, which had included a class reunion, a family reunion, another class reunion, and a memorial service for a cousin who passed away just after we had visited her. We had navigated massive crowds at train stations, hefting our suitcases onto trains and up long staircases in stations whose elevators were out of service. Having criss-crosscrossed northern Germany, slept in no fewer than 14 different beds, escaped Covid infections but not intestinal upsets, we had decided to spend a whole week unwinding in Freiburg, the jewel of the Black Forest, a small medieval city nestled in amongst vineyards and orchards. We had lived here with our youngest daughters for a couple of years a decade and a half earlier and had a few friends with whom we always enjoyed visiting, so this was where we decided to have our holiday from the holiday.
Now, on our last evening, we had dined with good friends in a lovely patio restaurant, enjoyed the local wine, and had returned to our Airbnb to finish packing our suitcases and prepare for an early start: a cab to the train, the train to Frankfurt airport, and our flight home. We had done this trip countless times before, so, barring train or flight delays, we felt we were covered.
At 6:30 the next morning, my husband informed me that his cell phone was not working. Of course it wasn't: the 30 day SIM card had expired the night before, and so phone calls were not going to happen. Fortunately, we still had wifi, so I sent a WhatsApp to our friends who lived three blocks away from where we were staying to ask them if they could drive us to the station. We still had (not so plenty of) time, since our train was scheduled to depart at 7:58.
No response. Their cell was turned off.
So I made a WhatsApp call to other friends of ours to ask them to phone a cab for us. Fifteen minutes later, they called back to say that no cabs were free anywhere in the city for at least an hour.
By now, it was after 7 am and we were running out of options.
My husband thought we should go down to the street and see if we could hail a taxi. Doing so would mean leaving our wifi behind and render us incommunicado, but I had no better ideas and thought, if nothing materializes, we could still run (!!) for the streetcar.
The friends who had tried to call a cab for us phoned just as we were locking the door behind us to say they were on their way and would drive us. They lived half an hour outside of the city - half an hour's drive under ideal conditions, but this was rush hour and the streets would be clogged. I had by now given up on fond notions of taking the early train, on which we had reserved seats, and was resigned to a frantic scramble for seats and suitcase stowage on the later commuter train and having to switch trains at Frankfurt's main station to get to the airport, only to jitter impatiently in long security lineups to make our plane.
Down at street level, the only traffic to be seen consisted of pedestrians and cyclists. We were not exactly staying in a bustling part of town, which had originally been its most charming and was now its least desirable feature.
My husband flagged down a passing cyclist and asked to borrow his phone. The obliging fellow tried a couple of cab companies for us, and, from the second, managed to elicit a promise that it would try to send us a car in roughly half an hour. That would deposit us at the train station a good 10 minutes after our train's departure time. It also meant we would not be able to run for the streetcar, as our arrival there would achieve exactly the same result.
At this point, I had settled into a preternatural, deadly calm.
My husband is used to me delivering a rant when I'm this angry.
"If we actually manage to make our flight after all this carry on, I won't file for divorce when we get home," I reassured him in a frosty tone. "We should have ordered a taxi. Last. Night."
Whether that had any effect, I'll never know. To our amazement, a taxi suddenly pulled up.
It was exactly 7:37 and we told the cabbie, as we threw the suitcases in the trunk, we would give him an extra 20 Euros if he could get us to the platform for the InterCity Express in 15 minutes.
Once in the car, weaving through traffic as only cabdrivers can do, I remembered our friends on their way to drive us themselves, and used the car's wifi to call them on WhatsApp. Fortunately, they are good, understanding people, and they graciously accepted our abject apologies for stirring things up needlessly. Or maybe they were just relieved that we, their chaotic friends, were on our way home!
The taxi driver was as good as his word: he pulled up at the station, right beside the ICE platform, as the express train blew in. The platform was more crowded than I had ever seen it, and we pushed our way with some desperation through the crush of travellers to get on the train - a considerable feat, for the InterCity Express stops for only two minutes before the doors slam shut.
The train was suspiciously...not full. As it began to slip out of the station, I looked around for the number of the car and for our reserved seats and realised, with growing dread ---
We were on the wrong train.
A quick look at the electronic readout by the door confirmed that disturbing fact. Furthermore, being on the wrong train had multiple unpleasant implications, some more unpleasant than others.
Being on the wrong train meant we had not paid for the privilege of being on this train. If the conductor were to show up, we would not only be facing a fine, but we would have to pay the fare for this and any connections we would need to make to get us to our destination.
Being on the wrong train meant also having to figure out where to transfer to get to our destination. This train was definitely not bound for Frankfurt.
Being on the wrong train also meant we did not have either the time or the inclination to seek out a conductor to help sort us out, given the potential costs that would incur, and we still did not know which train we were actually on.
There was a time when the trains in Germany had printed timetables at every seat, timetables that gave all the details of the journey in question, right down to all the stops' times and platforms along the route. But printed timetables were clearly a thing of the past, and my brain was frantically in overdrive at this point.
There had to be an app for that.
We were now ten minutes into our journey, but we had wifi. So I called up the Bahn (Rail) app, on which our tickets for the planned trip were stored, and I learned everything I needed to know to get us back on track to where we needed to go.
The train on which we found ourselves had been delayed, and so had arrived at Freiburg train station ten minutes late, exactly to the minute at which our booked train should have departed. That had then delayed the train we should have been on, also by ten minutes. The delays accounted for the massive crush of people at the station. Because we had believed the arriving train to be ours, we had quickly boarded, thinking we would find our car and assigned seats afterwards. Usually, one boards one's assigned car at the point of its designated halt - all of these procedures are familiar to us, but because of our own delayed arrival at the station, we had quickly climbed aboard, believing we could sort out minor issues later.
The ensuing issues were hardly minor, but, as long as a conductor didn't arrive to complicate matters for us, I believed the app could bail us out. Nevermind that the absence of a conductor was unusual! But I was not about to question our good fortune, as long as it held.
I discovered from the app that both trains would stop at one station along the route before parting ways, namely in Baden Baden. I also learned that the train for which we had tickets would stop there ten minutes after the one we were on. If we could debark at that station, we would have time to find the spot on the platform where our car would stop.
Within minutes, the train pulled into Baden Baden and we climbed off, with our luggage in tow and a stroke of good luck depositing us both on the right platform and at almost the right spot for the right car on the incoming train a few minutes later.
We boarded the train for which we had originally booked tickets with considerable relief, and settled into our seats after stowing our cases, just as the conductor appeared at the front of the car. "Neu zugestiegen?" he barked. We were that --- newly boarded.
As he scanned our tickets on my trusty app, I suppressed a huge sigh and took out my knitting. It was 8:30 am and we had had enough misadventures to last us the rest of the journey already, and I fully intended to make the best of the next 2 hours before having to contend with Frankfurt airport's security line ups and throngs of travellers. It had been a long trip that could have ended very badly, but somehow our luck had saved it.
And we both have a final take on how things had gone sideways: if I had remembered when the SIM cards were due to expire, my husband insists he would have called a taxi the night before. I maintain that if he had done the sensible thing and called a cab the night before, it wouldn't have mattered, and all our friends could have slept in. The most important thing is that divorce was deferred, and we made it home still on good terms.
