Booking the Train to Italy - an all day exploration!

Today is the day to figure out how we will make it to Italy. Our internet connection has been down since last night, so we cannot look up anything on the net, but we apparently need to go into Marseille anyway to book travel outside of France, so away we go. Our hosts (Chris and Aban) suggest that we drive to the train station here and take the train into Marseille as apparently it is not fun driving in Marseille, so off we go. However, when we get there, there is a line up at the ticket booth that is about a mile long, and the next ticket we can get through the automated machine (which doesn’t seem to like our credit card) isn’t until 2 pm (2 hours from now), so we decide, “screw it let’s just drive to Marseille”. Into Marseille we go, we drive to the train station, we miss the parking lot turnoff, we are in a tunnel, and oops, bye train station, out of Marseille we go. So once we finally find a way off the motor and get turned around, back into Marseille we go, and back to the train station – this time we make it to the parking. We walk down the platform to the ticket booth that is swarmed with people, and next thing we know, all the doors close and we are all locked out – the ticket booth is closed??? What is going on??
So we stand around, trying to understand what is going on, and finally after about 30 mins, the booth opens again, and we stand in line with the million other people waiting. So after an entire afternoon has past, we finally have our tickets which are from Aix to Nice to Genova to Pisa. By now our day is shot to tour anywhere, so we just head back home. Internet still down, but luckily we have a phone number for Avis so Kevin takes care of our car rental too. All is finally set for moving on to Italy! However, our train brings us into Pisa at about 8pm, and with the time to pick up the rental car and drive to our villa, we figure we won’t arrive until about 10 or 11 pm. Our info tells us the host will only be available 4-8om for key pickup, and since we have no internet communication, we call to find out what we can do. We struggle dialing the hosts number; nothing seems to work, so we call the agency we booked through and explain our situation. They say they will contact the host, and find out our options and call us back, which they never do. Maybe we’ll have internet tomorrow??