Barga’s missing buses and magic busgirls
View from Barga's Fornaci Station
Beautiful Barga taught me two valuable travel lessons:
1. Never trust a Tuscan timetable
2. Never underestimate the kindness of strangers
Heading home from a day of pounding Lucca’s pavements, we left the train at Fornaci and wandered towards the bus stop. Barga’s two stations, Galicano and Fornaci, are several miles from the town – life is too slow to make public transport a pressing issue.
Forty minutes later, despite the timetable’s insistence that the last bus of the night was due, our guts told us otherwise. So off we went to fill said guts at the nearest trattoria where we’d later ‘phone a taxi. Simple.
As we polished off our tiramisu and settled up, a linguistically painful conversation with our waiter ensued. His concerned expression immediately told us there was a problem. ‘Mi dispiace. C’e non taxi stasera. Perche la partita.’ Italy were playing a big footie fixture and the local cabbies were going nowhere.
Did I mention that the heavens opened in the most spectacular fashion? And that the road home was a steep, muddy, unlit track? Our worried waiter disappeared into the kitchen returning with an aproned lady. Despite her English and my Italian, I deciphered enough to realise that she was offering to drive us back to our apartment herself!
The journey flew by in a surreal blur. Many ‘troppo gentiles’ were gratefully uttered, petrol money was refused and heartwarming lessons were learned about the extraordinary hospitality of our Tuscan hosts.
This post has been entered into the GranTurismo HomeAway Holiday-Rentals travel blogging competition on the theme of local travel.
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Very nice story! Your #3 lesson could be: Calcio (and also meal times) – never to be messed with in Italy. I had a similar experience in Naples. Our problem was that the train schedule was correct and the train was on time, probably the one and only time it has ever happened in Italy. We missed the last train, and the kindness of bus drivers made it back to our hotel. Good luck with the competition.