Sunday, November 25th was suppose to be an uneventful train ride back to Rome and then back to campus. But for some reason train riding is never uneventful with my wife. I already mentioned the train was 2 and a half hours delayed on Friday. however, I failed to mention the train incident on Thursday on the way back to campus from Rome.

When Amy arrived on Thursday the 15th we bought her a weekly metro pass. This allowed her to ride the local trains, metro, and buses in Rome. We also bought extra train tickets for Friday and Sunday so she could ride the train to Termini for our trip. And return to campus from Termini on Sunday. Well our math skills are apparently no good because her weekly pass actually ran out on Wednesday. So on Thursday during our return trip to campus the conductor checked our tickets. They don't check all the time. But this evening they did.

He told us that her pass expired on Wednesday because that was the seventh day. So Amy pulls out one of her daily passes we planned to use on Friday and Saturday. And announces that she does have a ticket for the train. This was good and bad. It was good because we did not incur a 50 euro fine for riding the train without a ticket. It was bad because all tickets must be validated *date and time stamped". Since her ticket was not yet validated, remember we planned to use it the next day. He charged us 5 euros for not validating our ticket. Which was still better than 50 euro fine for no ticket.

So on Sunday we caught a train from Assisi to Foligno where we had to change trains to travel to Rome. There was a large group of very active and loud students on the train with us from Assisi to Foligno. Once we changed trains we tried to stay away from this loud group and climbed into a different car from theirs. It is about two hours from Foligno to Rome. After about an hour the conductor came by to check our tickets. He said something in Italian I didn't understand. I asked him to repeat, and he said in English that we owed 18 euros. I didn't understand why because we remembered to validate our tickets. And he pointed to the door and said we were sitting in first class with a second class ticket. We never realized that in our attempt to ditch the loud students, we ended up in first class.

I apologized for the mix up and told him we would move to second class. He said we were welcome to move but we still owed him 12 euros instead. When I asked why he patiently explained that we had already been sitting in first class for over half the trip and we had to pay for that mistake. I told him we would just pay the 18 euros and stay where were. He was satisfied with this.