Rookie mistake

June 16th - Today was a travel day as we made our way to Prague. We left the apartment a little after 9:30am for the train station. We had a short walk to the metro station and then an easy transfer via the metro to the train station. We got to the train station about 40 minutes before our train left, so plenty of time to buy our tickets, get some cash, and mail some post cards. Right as we entered the train station, Amy found the post office to mail her cards. I was looking at the departure board to determine what track our train left from, but couldn't find it on the board. I thought maybe it wasn't listed yet. As we were walking towards the ticket office, I found the departure schedule that lists all the trains that depart from this station and again, our train was not on it. At this point it hit me that there are multiple stations in Vienna and we were probably at the wrong one. I was still hopeful as I approached the ticket office, but that was quickly dashed as the attendant confirmed that our train departed from the south station and we were at the west station. After 100+ days of train travel, we know to always check the station, but for some reason, didn't pay attention here. Our train left at 10:58 and it was now 10:30. He indicated that the tram between the 2 stations would take about 25 minutes but that we could probably get there faster via taxi. I went ahead and purchased the tickets and we ran out the door looking for a taxi. We found one and off we went for the south station. Luckily, there was not much traffic so we made it to the station in about 15 minutes. We kept trying to stay focused so that we didn't make a bad situation worse by forgetting a backpack or kid or something. We know by this point that when you get flustered, you often make more mistakes. So we paid the driver, double checked that we had all our belongings and made our way towards our train. Luckily we made it to the train with about 5 minutes to spare. The train ride was a 4 hour train ride, so we were hoping for a compartment train again where we could spread out. However, this train was all "row" seating, but we found a car with 4 seats that face each other (2 and 2) and only one other person in the entire car...and off we went. After a while we came to the first stop of the train and realized we were somehow 50 minutes behind schedule. Not sure how this happened since we left on time, but it did. So our 4 hour ride had just become 5 hours. We also began to notice it was really hot on board. I finally got up and walked to the next car and it was about 20 degrees cooler in that car. We realized the air conditioner was not working in our car, so we moved all our stuff. This greatly increased our comfort for the remainder of the non-eventful ride. We arrived in Prague just before 4pm and were greeted at the track by Alexander, the apartment owner. He loaded us up in his mini-van and drove us the 5 minutes or so to the apartment. We dropped off our stuff and made our way to the local grocery store. We picked up our usual essentials and brought them back to the apartment. We then headed out for dinner. We had been provided some restaurant recommendations from Anne-Marie and one of them turned out to be a block from our apartment. We enjoyed an awesome, Czech dinner. Amy had the "chef's surprise" with potato pancakes, pork, camembert, and cabbage. I had the bohemian platter with pork, sausage, bread/potato dumplings, and cabbage. And of course we had a couple of local brewed beers. It was all delicious! We are definitely looking forward to the Prague dining.