If you’re ever in Livorno/Leghorn Italy and looking for the Grimaldi Line ferry to Barcelona, it is not where you think it is. It is a couple miles north. If you don’t speak Italian, this may be hard to understand as you go in circles for a while and are turned away from the entrances of two different cruise terminals by Italian folk who look like this may be the first time they have heard of a boat going to Barcelona from their city.

Or maybe this look was because its the first time they had encountered a pair of cyclists looking for a boat to Barcelona and they knew already what we were about to find out. As one review of this trip by an earlier traveler said, this port is not optimized for non-car traffic. We went in vaguely the direction we had been pointed and followed signs that sounded something like what we thought we had been told until we got to the point where the way we were pretty sure we were supposed to go was an on ramp to a highway that had pretty clear signs indicating no motorcycles under 249 cc, no mopeds under 149 cc, no bikes, no pedestrians and no horse drawn vehicles. So tough luck to us.

We decided to take the other option, because although it died not have the same name as the terminal we had been directed to, it did match one set of the directions on the ferry line’s website. These directions are helpfully provided for drivers to get to two different terminals in Livorno, although no mention is made of which terminal you should go to if you are going to Spain, or which if you’re going to Sardenia, or wherever else their ships go from this port. And no, of course there was no information on our printed ticket either.

So forward we went, as there was no point in staying when we were, on the side of a wide road about to turn into an elevated highway. We followed a road which went around and under the highway and after a bit to a roundabout next to a a bar and restaurant full of big rig trucks. We were well into cargo territory now, with the port and all. Towards the restaurant looked like one way with loaded trucks coming down, so we went with the other option, and eventually came to what I thought was a weigh station for the trucks, but the taller half looked a little closer and noticed a hand written paper sign in the window that said something like Barcelona check-in.

And on the other side from where the trucks where being weighed was a dingy window where a woman took our printed confirmation and gave us official tickets, and we discovered that despite the high price we paid for tickets for an outside cabin (no inside available and 20 hours with only a deck chair space sounding extremely unpleasant) we are assigned separate cabins. On account of cabins having the capacity for four, and our being different genders. This is not the way it works on trains, of course, where you share a sleeping compartment with a mixture of people.

Anyway, the ticket woman indicated we should go back and take a left at the bar. Which we did, after figuring out there was an option which went not onto the highway, but under it and along the other side. We went and we got to a point where we could see the ship, but we were definitely overshooting its location. So we went back, but we had to stop a bit at a gate where a lone of big rig trucks were coming out. Then as we started off again I looked and realized the trucks were bringing cargo from the back end of what had to be the ship we wanted!

When we entered this gate, a security fellow came up to tell us we couldn’t be there. We showed him our tickets. Oh, okay then, yes. We should wait and he would call us. After a bit he sent us around the corner to a bare and temporary little building unit, the sort of thing that is the office at a construction site. It had chairs (blue, in connected sets of three) and lights (fluorescent) and that was it. It was a waiting box, and so we waited.

About when we were done wondering what miracle had led us to find both the check in office and the boat itself, a man in a brightly colored and official looking jacket and hat came and led us to another man who scanned our tickets and turned us over to a third man, who directed us to put our bikes in a little room marked luggage deposit, just off the car deck.

And now we are aboard, waiting til the ship sails to see if either of us has bunkmates, but so far, no, so maybe we get one more bit of luck. We’ve already looked at Google maps for Barcelona, and thank goodness it doesn’t look half as complicated as this was.

I should mention, though, that since Friday we were staying in a small Tuscan town with an Italian friend I made when I was an exchange student in high school, and she and her boyfriend made everything wonderful. Then, today, as we took the train to Livorno, we met two Italians in the bike/luggage car and chatted with them. The young woman got off at the same stop with us and said her way home was on the way to the ferry, so she led us from the train station first to a sandwich shop for the local favorite food – chickpea pancakes with pickled eggplant in a focaccia sandwich – and then to a grocery store so we could get food to survive the ferry journey. Cecilia, I only know your first name, but you are an angel and I will have to help twenty lost tourists when we get back to Seattle.