There's a version of that summer where I never miss the ferry — where I check the schedule twice, arrive with an hour to spare, and get a normal seat across the Adriatic like everyone else. I think about her sometimes. She has a much less interesting story to tell.
I was traveling alone through Croatia and had been working my way toward Italy, nothing unusual about the route — Split to Ancona was just the straightforward way to keep heading west. I wasn't chasing an adventure. I missed a ferry by about an hour, one summer evening, and had to figure out what came next.
The port wasn't offering much. The last passenger ferry was long gone. The only thing still moving that night was a cargo ship, loading up, clearly not built for anyone traveling as a passenger.
I asked anyway. It turned out to be much less complicated than I'd expected — cash, and none of the normal check-in process I'd have gone through for a real ticket. Someone agreed, I paid what I paid, and that was that. No paperwork, nothing formal about it at all.
I ended up on a coil of rope between two shipping containers, backpack under my head instead of a pillow. The rope was uncomfortable, but better than the bare deck underneath it, and I spent a good part of the night trying to convince myself I could actually sleep there.
The crew didn't seem to need much sleep, or didn't get around to it that night either way. A card game ran for hours under a bare bulb strung up near the containers, and I mostly watched rather than joined — they were clearly comfortable with each other, the game a normal part of their evening that I was just standing at the edge of. At one point someone tried to explain the rules to me. Between the language barrier and my not knowing the game at all, I never really understood it. We laughed about it more than anything.
That was probably the first moment all night I stopped thinking about how strange my situation was. For a few minutes I was just another person standing around watching a card game, not a stranger sleeping on rope because he'd missed a boat.
They offered me cigarettes a few times over the course of the night. I never took one, but it was one of those small gestures that made the whole thing feel less like I'd wandered onto a ship I had no business being on.
Mostly what I remember is the ship itself — the engine running under everything, the deck shifting slightly with the water, the bulb's light sitting oddly among the containers. And somewhere underneath all of it, a mix of disbelief and amusement. I'd been worried at first, genuinely unsure whether getting on board had been the right call. But once we were underway there wasn't much left to do about it, and the whole situation was too ridiculous to spend much energy panicking over. I'd missed a ferry by an hour and ended up sleeping on a rope coil on a cargo ship. Uncomfortable, sure. But I was moving in the right direction, and that counted for something.
I didn't sleep much, if I'm honest. But I got through the night, and at some point the coastline came up again on one side of the ship.
Seeing land wasn't cinematic. I was too tired for that. Mostly I was just thinking about getting off, getting my bearings, figuring out where to go next. But it was reassuring all the same — proof the strange part of the trip was actually over, and that I'd made it across.
I got off with the crew. No dramatic arrival, nothing to mark the moment beyond solid ground under my feet again, which after that night felt like enough on its own.
It didn't turn me into someone who deliberately looks for the strangest way to get somewhere. But it changed how seriously I take a missed plan now. Sometimes there isn't a clean backup option. You just work out what's actually possible, and go with it.
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