This hasn't been easy, but I think it's been valuable and a good confidence boost. I'm traveling through rural Tuscany right now (near Siena), and it's been kind of a series of ridiculous events.

This is the second week of a two week trip. The first week I visited friends in two cities in eastern and central Europe, and now I'm in Italy. I chose it because I speak the language and thought it would be a nice intro to solo travel, but I don't think I prepared myself adequately for the challenges of traveling alone because I had the fallback of knowing the language.

A whole host of unfortunate events have gone down since I got here. My airbnb is 8 km away from the train station of Siena, which I did intentionally because I wanted to chill before I start my internship next week (in the city I studied abroad in actually) and there is normally a bus. Yesterday when I got to the station the bus wasn't running because of a strike, the next train (I found out my house is the next stop up from Siena) wasn't coming for another 7 hours, and a taxi cost upwards of 50 euro so I decided to walk it. I normally don't mind walking, but since my two week trip started I've been walking an average of 15 miles a day according to the health app on my phone and I had some pretty severe blisters on my feet which were legit bleeding through my socks.

I toughed it out and decided to walk through the pain, but when I started out there was road work and the only road through to where I needed to be was one lane. I braced myself and walked into traffic that alternated between oncoming and going behind my back for half a kilometer and made it to the main road. The views were absolutely breathtaking, and at this point I couldn't stop laughing at the absurdity of the situation. It felt like a real adventure, and I started to forget how stressed out I had been earlier (I had already missed two trains that day).

That's when the first big pangs of loneliness hit. I didn't have anyone to share the situation with, and frankly it's kind of boring in the retelling. Explaining it won't ever convey just how sweaty and tired I was, how the vineyards smelled in the baking sun, how many times I was almost hit by oncoming traffic on that two lane provincial road, how heavy my backpack was, and just how much my feet were bleeding. I can explain it, but it's just not the same.

Then today my very hospitable airbnb host drove me to the bus station, and I made my way into Siena. It's a beautiful town, and I had a nice day overall. I hit some of the main sites, I talked to a few people casually, and it was all good. I was pretty lonely for portions of it, but it was manageable and was kind of romantic in a way. Then it came time to go.

The bus back to the little town I'm staying in wasn't running again, and I couldn't text my airbnb host for a possible ride because I don't have service out of the country I'm currently living in so I had to find the train station hoping that there would be a train. I wound my way through the city's medieval streets, asking for directions as I went, and it was all good. It took me about an hour and a half to find it because different people gave me wildly different directions. I made it there about 30 minutes before the next train, so I bought some prosciutto from the grocery store in the station and wolfed it down on the platform like a wild animal. I got some looks, but by that point I didn't care.

The train came, but I didn't have a ticket because the office was closed and frankly I didn't want to spend 20 euro on an 8 minute train ride. I dipped through the door that the conductor wasn't checking tickets at and literally hid in the bathroom until I heard the announcement that the train was stopping. I confidently left the bathroom to show that I wasn't hiding anything and pretended not to notice the conductor flagging me down as I disappeared off the platform and onto another rural two lane highway in the Tuscan countryside.

Now I was in the town limits, but I couldn't find my airbnb on Google maps and the train station was about a kilometer from the station. I walked through a pretty rural and industrial area and asked an old man who was walking with a bike if he knew where the street was. He had a Tuscan accent so thick and was missing so many teeth (I know this is mean, sorry) that I really could only understand the gist of what he was telling me. All I could make out was that he didn't quite know and that he needed help with his bike. I helped him pop the chain back on, and he told me to ask the mechanic who had just pulled into the empty lot behind us.

Thankfully his Italian was more manageable for me, and he explained the route. When I left the old man asked me where the street was and I explained, and he said a long string of sentences in his dialect that I couldn't really understand, so I smiled like I understood and told him to have a nice night. After another 15 minutes of walking, I made it to the uphill dirt road where my airbnb is and went to the fridge to heat up the pasta I had made yesterday. I could practically taste it, but when I went to put it in the microwave I realized there was no microwave.

I know this is long, but all in all it's been quite a challenging week alone (I was in another city before this, which is a whole other story) and I can't say it's been too fun which makes me feel really guilty because I know that many many people can only dream of traveling for an extended period and would love to go to Tuscany. Do you have any advice for making the most of it? Have you had an experience like this? How did you deal with it?