A bad travel day- October 26

Today started out well.  We left early enough to be on the first train. Then we had to get off the train at Heerenven to ride the bus to Steenwijk because they were working on the rails.  That wasn't so bad, very organized and a nice charter bus.  Then we got on the train to Meppen and there we had to get off because someone had been hit by a train between Meppen and Zwolle.  Apparently it was becoming a common occurance.  Now, I am very sorry that someone was hurt by the train, and I hope and pray that they were ok and not killed.  So the complaining coming is not without respect for the person injured.  But it was a really bad day from this point.  They told us that the earliest the trains would be back up and running was 1:30.  They began bussing people.  But it was chaotic.  There were only 3 or 4 busses at first and a thousand people in the parking lot.  It was unorganized craziness.  Every time a bus pulled up, the masses of people shoved their way to get on board.  We stood there for almost 2 hours and finally we went to get some lunch and take a break from the craziness.  Then we went back to see if we could get on a bus.  By then the crowd was down to a few hundred.  We were finally to the spot where we could get on a bus and a train police man was finally directing people.  We were about to get on the bus and the police man said "this is the last bus."  This was almost 3 hours being stuck there.  We were able to get on but I was almost in tears from the whole thing.  We made it to Zwolle and ran to catch the train to Rotterdam, but almost as soon as we got there, it was cancelled.  We had to wait another half hour for a different train.  At this point, we had given up on getting to see any of Brugge and were just hoping we could catch a taxi to our hotel before they quit coming to the train station.  We finally made it to Rotterdam and got our tickets to Brugge.  That took another couple of hours and lots of train stops and transfers because we had missed the last high speed train.  When we arrived at the train station, we were able to get a taxi, went straight to the hotel, and went to bed.  What a frustrating day!