Travel Day 18 — A Day Trip and a Friend around the World

For our last day in Italy Dean and I went to Verona to meet up with a BCIT friend of ours Sophia. I bought the tickets the day before to take the train from Venice to Verona, and back. The end cost was pretty cheap, being about $60 CAD for both of us. The train system around Italy is cheap, fast and effective, and really a great way to see the countryside as well (even though I spent most of my time on the first train ride typing up the first of the two blog posts I had to write up for the day).
We started the day out early, getting up at 6:00 to head out for 7:00 and catch our train for 8:12. The train ride was a 1h20m ride, and we got in at just 9:40 to Verona. I had meant to the night before download the map of Verona on Google Maps for offline usage, but once more, the wifi is horrible here so after I’d uploaded the blog I didn’t want to play on my phone anymore and just went to bed. Whoops. Anyways, we got to Verona, I ended up telling us to get off the stop before we actually needed to. This caused us to end up about 30 minutes from our final destination, but as we got out to the street I told Dean to head the wrong way so we ended up walking around the cemetery. Yeah I really regret not downloading the map the night before. It took about 45 minutes to head over to the Verona Arena. We sat down and relaxed in the park for an hour. I actually ended up having a nap in the park for about an hour before we headed over to Castelvecchio to meet up with Sophia. We met up with Sophia at 12:00 to head into the castle’s museum and walk around.
While we ended all talking and up catching up more than learning about the history of the castle and what it’s all about, it was a bunch of fun. The views from atop the castle and overlooking the river in Verona were lovely. We spent about an hour or so there before we decided it was time to get some food. We went to grab pizza before we met up with Sophia’s friends while walking over to Romeo and Juliet’s balconies. There isn’t all that much to do in Verona otherwise, it was just great to catch up with Sophia after having her been gone the past 4 months in Italy.
We got some Gelato around 15:00 and lost track of time so Dean and I had to say bye to Sophia and her friends while Dean and I started running for the train. We ended up running close to 2 km to the train station. We made it on the train and a minute later the door closed behind us. Phew! Thank goodness the train was A/C’ed and we were sweating bullets. I personally had an amazing sleep on the train.
When we got back to Venice, we took the water bus back to the hostel and just grabbed a burger in the hostel. Luckily the world cup was on and it was €11,50 for a burger and a beer as a deal. We made it down to watch at the 35 minute mark of the Portugal vs. Spain game, and enjoyed the great atmosphere of watching a Football (⚽️) game in Italy. When Renaldo got the penalty kick and scored to tie the game, the place went nuts! We headed up to pack and it was time to head to bed since tomorrow was going to be the long day home. To a long day!
~Spencer
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Thanks for the read!