Spittal to Zürich

One last croissant, for old time's sake.

Maybe some days are best forgotten.  While eight hours on a train is infinitely easier than any length of airplane travel, it's still not the nicest way to spend a day. Particularly when your children are feeling emotionally fragile.  Ella was teary, saying over and over that this was the best week of her life and despairing that we'd never return.  Dennis and I tried to console her with other trips we'd be taking, things to look forward to: Legoland! Milan! Castles! Paris! Disneyland!!

"Disneyland? Disneyland will be like a social studies test compared to this week," sighed Ella.  No, Europe is now dead to my desolate child.  It's hard when a vacation ends. Particularly when the vacation involved ice cream buffets and bottomless jars of Nutella for breakfast. As often happens, sadness turned to rage, and the kids started fighting. Dennis and I used the only leverage we had, taking away their videos and iPhone games for the first several hours of the trip.  Essentially, we were punishing ourselves, but it was the best currency we had, and, while it would have been nice to read our own books on the train, well, what choice did we have?

But everyone's mood brightened instantly when Inga gave the the kids each their own Smiley doll as a parting gift.  Maybe there is something to be said for that little yellow guy: he kept my kids happy long after we left the hotel, as they played hide-and-seek with their dolls at the train station.

Since Spittal was a very minor stop in the train's route, we had all of a minute to get our four bags, our backpacks, and our three kids aboard.

The kids have become quite the savvy train passengers in the last two months, and so when the train slowed into the station (heralded by Joey's cry of "Our train! Our train!") and we said "RUN," they ran, (or toddled, as the case may be) looking for our car, up the length of the track. We finally realized our car must be towards the very back and jumped on when we had gotten well past halfway, lugging our bags the final few cars. Phew!

The kids settled in quite well, and after those few hours we happily surrendered the electronics.

Our only break in travel was a fifteen-minute layover in Salzburg, and our second leg was running uncharacteristically late, eventually extended by an hour.  So it was a long, long day on the train, and we didn't walk through our front door until 6:30 that night, pulling together a dinner of bread, cheese, apples, and honey.

Ella, who had been quite cheerful on the train, settled into her little gloom-cocoon again.  She was clearly anxious about returning to school, and really affected by leaving her English-speaking friends from the hotel.  She misses Seattle intensely this night.

I'm confident that she'll feel better after a morning at school.  And I suspect Disneyland will even regain its shimmer.