Oh Mitfahrgelegenheit. You're such a ridiculously long German word, and yet you've enabled me to travel so much this year. Including my 24 hour trip to Hamburg with Katharina. We had such a nice driver from Dortmund to Hamburg and the whole visit, while family and friends inquired about the integrity and reliability of the system, I had nothing but positive things to say. "OMG, I've never had a bad experience!" "The drivers are so friendly" "It's always been very punctual and reliable!"...
Enter: foot in mouth
For our ride home we had arranged to be picked up between 7 and 8pm. Since we weren't really in a hurry and the guy was picking us up where we were staying, we were flexible on the time and just asked him to call us about 20 minutes before he was planning on leaving.
And then 7:40pm rolled around without a word from him, so we decide to call him. Of course his phone doesn't even ring and goes straight to a message saying phone calls are not available to the number, but we can text. Not a good sign. After another 5 minutes the panic set in and we decided to do an emergency scan of the website to see if we could catch any last minute rides home. Finally around 8pm we found a new driver who had 2 spots free and still had heard nothing from our original driver. But it couldn't be that simple yet: our new driver was leaving at 9pm from a place across the city that takes us almost an hour to get to.
The next 40 minutes involved a lot of running for subway connections and cursing our original driver, but eventually we made it to the meeting point in time.
This was the point that my faith in mankind was broken. To this day, we never heard from the original driver who was supposed to pick us up. Not even so much as an email to be like "oh, I was attacked by a bear while the ghost of Dumbledore stole my cell phone so I couldn't call" (I mean really, any excuse!). He basically just left us stranded in Hamburg with no word, no warning, nothing. Not to mention late in the day. At 8pm on a Sunday, not many people are starting the 3.5 hour drive to Dortmund.
And the panic had still not completely passed. Our new driver (pretty much the only one left at this point) was only driving to Unna (a smaller city about 20km from Dortmund), so we still had to catch a train from Unna to Dortmund. But now that we were leaving almost 2 hours later than originally planned, we were fairly certain we weren't going to make our last train home.
Our new driver knew about our time crunch, so he was doing everything in his power to get us to our destination on time. This meant really exploiting the Autobahn for all it's speed-limitless glory. I'm not gonna lie (and I can feel my mom yelling at me as I type this), we hit speeds up to 200kmh (~120mph). And all the while the 2 other girls riding with us were helping us look up train times (oh did I mention Katharina's phone battery was dead and I had no prepaid money left... not that I could look up train times on my phone anway...). The last train for the night was leaving Unna at 12:27am and it kept looking more and more unlikely that we would actually make that.
Finally the woman who was getting off in Kamen (a town about 15 minutes before Unna) said there was an hourly train from there that definitely went at 12:30am. Since that was a more realistic goal we started getting our hopes up again.
When we arrived at the Kamen train stations about 6 minutes before the train was supposed to leave we noticed it wasn't on the electronic departures board. But it was on the printed daily schedule that never changes. We looked around trying to figure out the discrepancy before our driver left us.
And of course - with all the luck we were having that night already - we saw it. A notice hanging that said for that night only the 12:30 train to Dortmund was canceled for construction. Only that train, only that night. Seriously. Seriously?!
And then my faith in humanity was restored. After everything that had gone wrong that night, our new driver - who had to be at work in 6 hours - offered to simply drive us the rest of way back to Dortmund. Granted it's not terribly far out of the way, but for a complete stranger to offer to go out of his way at possibly the most inconvenient time (it was already past midnight at this point) instead of stranding us small-town Germany until the morning trains started in about 4 or 5 hours was seriously one of the nicest things I've ever experienced. Not to mention he only asked for an extra 5€ total from us for going the extra mile (puns!). I mean, I was ready to empty my wallet in his hand if he had asked.
So around 1am we pulled up right to our door, thanked him profusely, and finally made it up to our own beds.
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