Florence to Pisa

The first shuttle from the hotel doesn't arrive at the dropoff until 8:45, and since our train departs at 8:28, we had to get a cab.  We'd asked the front desk last night to have one waiting for us at 7:30, and we were down there at 7:25, just in time to see another couple get into what may or may not have been our cab.  Lyle was unhappy with this development, but the front desk assured us another cab was on the way.  

Then two women came in from somewhere, and retrieved bags from the hotel storage.  Lyle thinks they were, shall we say, women of the evening, and I do not immediately have a better explanation.  They tried to steal what may or may not have been our cab, but Lyle was having none of this.  The front desk dude was yelling at someone, could have been them, could have been us, and the women who may or may not have been professionals tried to get me stuck in the revolving door, but I powered through.  

We arrived at the train station without incident, though Italian driving is an adventure every time.  I noticed that neither our cab nor the bus in front of us even slowed down at the stop sign, but I failed to notice that we almost plowed into a terrified (probably foreign) pedestrian.  Lyle said the look of sheer terror on her face was that of one who had seen death in her immediate future.

Despite Lyle's concern, which, for a change was not enhanced by panic on my part about timing, we got to the train station with about an hour to spare, which gave Lyle time to get a cup of coffee, since we hadn't had time for breakfast at the hotel.  Lyle having coffee is good for everyone with whom he has to interact, especially me.  I was waiting outside the cafe with our bags, so I missed him trying to manage ordering and cafe protocol, but he reports that he had to have a little old Italian woman intervene for him.  At least this time it wasn't a BBG.  He's not sure what she said to the baristas, but he's pretty sure she was swearing like a sailor when they passed him over for the second time.

This is our first Regional train, instead of the high speed ones, so we had to convert our e-ticket to an actual paper ticket (we did this last night) at the little desk here at the station.  It was a non-issue for us, because the guy at the desk spoke perfect English, but the printer machine was down for a moment and he did make the whole line wait while he rebooted it for us.  Meanwhile, some German woman had come in, yelled at him, gone away, come back, and yelled at him again.  His reaction was to shrug, smile at us, and say, "Welcome to Italy."

Once we had our paper tickets, we had to "vaildate" them at the station.   I think Regional trains here don't have conductors, so they're considered "self service".  Validating them is easy though, you just insert the ticket into the machine and it goes clunk and then you get on the train.  No reserved seating, and no luggage storage.  Right now (8:26) the train is still virtually empty, so we're hoping that no one needs the seats facing us and we can leave our bags there instead of on our laps.  The ride to Pisa is about an hour.