I called my colleague, desperate and stranded, and her brother-in-law agreed to drive me the 45 minutes to Shumen. When I arrived and met my friend, we had time to catch a drink. That was my second mistake. We realized we were running late so we grabbed our bags and ran through the streets of Shumen to be four minutes late for our train.
Luckily, we caught the next one an hour later. I had worn a t-shirt under my coat in preparation for the sauna-like train cars. That was my third mistake. We found an empty cabin and settled in for our overnight ride. We waited for the heat to kick in but it never did. All plans of sleeping went out the window, as we sat there for five hours shivering and attempting to look out the frosted window.
Once we left the train we still had a bus to catch to Yablanitsa. We bought our tickets, found seats and tried to close our eyes before the sun would start to peak over the horizon. It's not easy to sleep on a bus that plays 80s pop-rock but we set our alarms to 7:30 when, according to the timetable, the bus was supposed to arrive in Yablanitsa. Some time around 7am we stopped in a town and I remember remarking on how pretty the Christmas lights were. The bus drove on and about ten minutes later the woman who took our tickets turns around and says, "Weren't you supposed to get off at Yablanitsa?" That was my fourth mistake.
So the bus driver pulled over on the side of the highway and opened the compartments below so we could get our bags. He points down the road and says, "Go straight and follow the signs." So there we were, walking on the side of a Bulgarian highway, with the sun just rising and the ground freshly slick from a recent sleeting. We walked a ways, with me falling once quite hard on the ice, but finally made it to Thanksgiving. As people arrived everyone had their own stories of wrong timetables, missed buses and walking on the highway.
It was worth it though, everybody brought food and we even had a 9 lb turkey and stuffing. Tobias had streamed NFL on his laptop and Neil brought his football. And finally, after much preparation, we were ready to eat after Angelo's moving speech, "I'm in Bulgaria, dammit!", and Billy's heartwarming toast to our new PC family.
Returning home wasn't nearly as difficult, except for the 10 leva fine I got in Sofia for not punching my bus ticket the right way: "There are supposed to be three holes, not two!"
