Day 6- V A R E N N A

Lesson: The Journey is the Destination—You’ve Already Arrived

On day 6, I migrated from Florence to Lake Como, and it was a VOYAGE.

The train from Florence to Como San Giovanni (which I thought was my final stop) takes approximately 3.5 hours, and it includes a transfer in Milan.

I was meeting up with my friend Jessica, who texted me when I was about a half hour away.

“Dude we need to get on another train for 2 hours—we booked our tickets for the wrong station. We need to go to Varenna.” I kind of started to melt down. Time is so precious when you travel and 2 hours on another train felt gut wrenching. I wanted to experience Italy!

After further research, we found that we could take a ferry that got us to Lake Como if we hustled. Before concluding the ferry was our best option, we tried everything to avoid it altogether. It felt like such an inconvenience—we just wanted to arrive already!

Little did we know, the ferry turned out to be one of the most incredible parts of the trip. For 10 euros we got a 3-hour boat cruise, where we lounged comfortably on the top deck of the boat with Aperol Spritz and become completely enthralled in the beauty of Lake Como.

When we finally got to Varenna, we thought all of our travel woes were behind us; we were wrong.

We got off the ferry, and met our host, who was to drive us to our Airbnb. It felt weird to get into a car with this strange middle aged man, but travel fatigue won, and in the car we got. Up the hill we climbed. We watched as the seaside town escaped behind us and we continued to climb the cliff into a completely remote location. 15 minutes later we “arrived.”

The Airbnb was remote and shared with a family and a total letdown. It was not at all what we expected or desired. There was also one room instead of two.

“Cars / taxis stop at 8 and there is one restaurant down the road” he said through a Google translate app. We had traveled all day for this??? By this time, I had been traveling for 10 hours and the sun was starting to set. If we were going to get out of this weird Airbnb situation, we were going to need to act fast.