I got woken up by a waiter in the purple lounge at about 8am, having slept remarkably well for someone who had to make do with a sofa that is stylishly curved in the wrong direction. They hadn’t made it easy – to discourage deck passengers (such as myself) from sleeping in the lounge the air-conditioning was set to ‘arctic’ and the TV was turned up louder. I put on a sweater, donned earplugs and continued to slumber undisturbed.Once I was awake, I went for breakfast in the self-service restaurant, and then decided that the time had come to rescue Chris from the confines of his first class cabin. At 10:30 Italian time we arrived in the port of Ancona, and I was quite sad to leave the luxurious Superfast XI, which was definitely the most well-appointed boat I’d been on.

Ancona was a bit dull. It reminded me of the port at Athens with all the diesel fumes and dreary buildings. Lonely Planet confirmed that it was basically the place where your boat turned into a train, or vice versa. Having worked out where the train station was and how to get there, we hopped on a bus.

Thirty minutes later we were busily making inquiries of the computerised ticketing system. Pisa, Florence, Milan and Turin were the contenders, and I had less than 20 minutes before Pisa and Florence would drop out of the running. Another twenty minutes saw Chris and I on our way to Florence. I thought the whole exercise was a blast – one of my ambitions when coming on this trip was to go to a train station and choose where to go actually at the station. Anyway, what of Sunil and Nathalia? Their decision making process was not quite as rapid as ours, and we left them at Ancona station, still thinking about it.

When we arrived we found that the list of hostels provided by the local tourist office was very short, and after a few calls realised that they were all full anyway. A man was wandering around the station and had already approached us once so we took up his offer of two nights for €22.50 per person per night.

A bus delivered us back to the station from our guesthouse so I could book my train to Paris – I was heading home at the end of the weekend. I had found a really good service that was actually direct, requiring me only to change once in Paris for the final leg to London. It was then that they told me there was a train strike.

This was not possible. I explained to the ticket agent that we were on a RAIL holiday, and would be requiring the services of a TRAIN, but there was no joy. My simple solution was going to turn into a rather more complex one. Still, I should be able to get an overnight train to Nice and then a superquick TGV service to Paris in the morning. This turned out to be a non starter too – although the train was scheduled to leave Florence after the strike ended, it was actually originating in Rome, while the strike was still on. What I eventually left the ticket office with was nothing short of a permit for self inflicted torture, which I would be experiencing on Sunday night.

We found a great place for dinner near Duamo Cathedral. I ordered steak for the first time in a fortnight, and got the largest piece of meat I’d ever seen, on the bone, and served on what looked like a chopping board. My side dishes had not arrived yet, and I was getting “Is-he-really-going-to-eat-that?” looks from neighbouring tables. But I did, and it was fantastic. Anything would have tasted good after our epic two-boat-one-bus-two-train journey spanning three days, but this was excellent anyway.