Did you know it took Odysseus ten years to make his way home to Ithaca after he and his Greek pals sacked Troy? Imagine, a whole decade to travel just 565 nautical miles (approximately 650 land miles.) That’s quite a meandering route with some serious stop-overs along the way. The actual siege of Troy lasted ten years as well. So, in total, Odysseus was away from home for twenty-years. That’s a long time to be away from the missus. I was surprised mine allowed me to go to Switzerland for just three nights.

Though, I am getting worried that, like Odysseus’ odyssey, our DadLadTour to Euro25 may take on epic proportions too.

I’m not overly concerned about one-eyed, cannabalistic giants. Nor do I anticipate being held as a carnal plaything by Calypso, the beautiful, sex-crazed goddess (not to be confused with Calypso, the orange-flavoured ice-lollies, available at Iceland). While the “love goddess” one does sound interesting, I’m not expecting anything of that nature to occur. For one thing I am too old for those shenanigans and, more importantly, Liam and I have a strict itinerary to maintain if we are to journey around the Swiss countryside and get to the three matches we have planned. The ravishing deity will have to find herself another toy to, well, ravish.

It’s the Swiss trains that are causing me some anxiety. Mainly the train we need to catch on our final day in Switzerland. We have to get to Geneva airport for a mid-morning flight back to Manchester. Our plan was to aim for the 0534 departure from Bern rail station. The two-hour journey would get us easily to the airport in time for all the pre-flight check-in rigamarole that modern travellers have to endure. Us twenty-first century folk don’t have the luxury that Odysseus did. He could board his ship at a time and place that suited him and set sail for wherever his heart desired. No passports. No security scanning. No interminable waits in terminals. Odysseus didn’t have to put all his liquids into little bottles sealed inside plastic bags. The Hero of Troy had it easy when it came to globe-trotting. Apart, from evading the man-eating Cyclops, that is. And having his travel buddies turned into pigs. Or drowned. Or crushed in the Strait of Scylla and Charybdis. And that ten-year trek. Apart from those, he had it easy.

We checked the SBB website this past Saturday; that was when tickets became available for Saturday July 12^th – the final day of our Euro adventure. All looked good. The site displayed the departure time we wanted (0534) and the train’s arrival at Genève-Aéroport at 0735. It told us the train number (IC1) and that it would leave from platform 6. All excellent information to know. At such an early hour, armed with these details, Liam and I would be able to stagger, bleary-eyed, safely to where we needed to be.

It was while perusing these details that I spotted something in the listing we were interested in. A little red square caught my eye. Inside this square was a pictogram of a man struggling to put up an umbrella. This, literal, “red flag” is instantly recognisable as a bad omen to all travellers. ROADWORKS.

Our train, the IC1, was a service specifically mentioned as being cancelled between Bern and Fribourg/Freiburg (a station slightly less than quarter of the way to Geneva) due to construction work. Horrifyingly, it went on to mention the three words most certain to cause fear in the minds of every rail-user; replacement bus service.

As a result, Liam and I have ourselves a Rätsel. That’s German for conundrum. (Switzerland is a multi-lingual country with four main languages. Of which, German, is the most commonly spoken by 62.2% of the population. Followed by French with 22.9%, Italian at 8.2% and the delightfully named Rhaeto-Rumantsch by a tiny 0.5% of Swiss folk.)

What should we do? Do we stick with our plan to overnight in Bern after the Italy v Spain match and risk the bus service getting us to Fribourg/Freiburg for the rest of the journey by train? Or get an Uber to connect with the IC1 service? Hitch-hike to pick-up the train? (Never gonna happen, I just threw that in to make me sound hip and edgy and adventurous.)

Do we scrap the overnight in Bern completely and head off to the airport immediately after the game? We’d still have the same issues but leaving post-match should allow us ample time. Given the timings, we’d probably just kip on a chair at Genève-Aéroport. That would mean we forego the hotel’s promise of a boxed breakfast, which got me so excited in an earlier post.

Currently, we are still deciding on the best course of action.

It seems our Euro trip might become our own Euro odyssey. (Damn, I should have referred to our adventure as an odyssey right from the start.)

Eur-odyssey, anyone?