One if by land, two if by sea, the French can strike but it won't f**k me

We land in Pisa to see the tower and grab some food. The plan is to catch a 24 hour train with some silly number of transfers to Barcelona. We go to the information booth and guess what? France is on strike. This is bad news for us, as we have a flight from Barcelona to London on Sunday.

If you're as bad at geography as me, you'll look at a map of Europe and realize that there's no way by train to get to Barcelona without going through France. This got my cousin pretty down, but I told him we've got some options: bus, rental car, plane, and boat. We hopped on the net after some sightseeing.

We find that there's a boat leaving from Livorno, Italy at 11:30pm. We book it online. It's now 9:30pm due to the sightseeing. We find that there's a train to Livorno leaving soon. It's only 15 minutes by train. We get to the station right when the train is supposed to leave. We run with our packs to the proper platform. No train ... shit, we missed it. Then we notice it's delayed by 10 minutes. It shows up about 30 seconds later. The doors stay open for less than 60 seconds. I have to pull one of the doors open after it closes.

We get to Livorno and get a taxi because on the train, we realize you have to check in an hour early and don't know exactly where the port is. John Luca is excited to see us and speaks the Queen's English. It turns out he lived in London for awhile. We notice later that he's rocking to an AC-DC CD.

We get a pretty nice cabin on the boat. We befriend a couple of crew members: Juan from Peru and Nick from Honduras who grew up in the Bronx. They tell us that they never have Americans on board. It's mostly Italian truck drivers. I guess this sort of explains why the crew was so nice to us .... Americans were a novelty here.

We get to Barcelona well rested and ready to party. We're staying at a hostel that has 24-hour entrance, but you're not allowed to leave after midnight. We ignored this rule yesterday and that's the plan hence forth. I'm not sure what the penalty is for ignoring it, but thus far there was none.

Last night we ended up hanging out with a Kiwi (New Zealander), a Fin, two Argentinians. We met two more Argentinians and a girl from Maryland. With a few more countries we could probably form our own United Nations. Surprisingly enough, we haven't met any Canadians or Aussies here, which has been rare on our travels. Maybe the French train strike got 'em ;-).