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Poway's Sandra Cordero Recalls Night Spent In Italian Police Station

Cordero says, in retrospect, she might have found a "fun way to travel around Italy."

There isn’t a travel agency in the world that can promise the type of overnight accommodations Sandra Cordero got while staying in Italy. Take the stazione carabinieri, for example―or police station.

On a break while studying abroad in Pisa in the mid-’90s, Cordero and her friend, Yolanda Gutierrez, spent the day and their cash on a trip to Elba―the island where Napoleon Bonaparte was first exiled. The duo misread the train schedule and arrived back on the mainland after the evening’s last departure.

“We had to walk back to the village, and it was the most scary experience,” said Cordero of dimly lit trek from the cargo port where the boat had left them. “You know when you’re watching a horror movie and you’re like, ‘Oh sure, now they’re going to walk?’ ”

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Without any cash or credit cards in their possession, they couldn’t stay at a hotel. Cordero says they considered hunkering down in the local hospital emergency room but decided on the police station instead.

“It was this beautiful villa and we pressed on the intercom,” said Cordero, a native Spaniard who has lived in Poway for more than two years. “We explained to them the situation and they were so confused. Finally, they decided to let us sleep there.”

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Cordero says the policemen offered them warm drinks and makeshift beds from chairs before driving them to the train station in a police car the following morning.

“The only thing I think we learned from the situation was to laugh about it,” said Cordero, adding that Gutierrez remained her partner in crime that whole year abroad. “We thought that might be a fun way to travel around Italy.”

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