Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Day 1 On the way. May 16-17.

It's going to be a long day of travel to get from NS to Italy.  All packed and ready, we traveled into Halifax to leave the car at  the condo and visit with Barb's mom and then take a limo out to the airport. The flight left Halifax 11:45pm to London, Heathrow.  Then after a short wait and a terminal change our next stop was Munich.

There was a problem at the airport (a plane had gone off the runway) and we circled for 30 minutes before landing.  Then we were delayed another hour and  thirty minutes before we left for Milan. The flight over the Alps was fantastic.  There is still a lot of snow in the mountains but the valleys are green. Fields of rapeseed are blooming yellow and we saw many fields of rice on the way into Milan.
We took the express train into the city from the airport and arrived  in the late afternoon 2 hours later than expected. The joys of international air travel.

One interesting thing we noticed.... whereas your passport is scanned leaving Halifax, entering the UK and entering and leaving Germany, no one so much as looked at us entering Italy. Nice.

Maite Fantini, the Rotary exchange student who had stayed with us 12 years ago, met us at  the train station and took us to her home where we'll stay till Monday.  She is an architect in business with her father. The nice little apartment we are staying in is her design.

We got caught up over a great supper in a small restaurant across the street and she filled us in on local customs. We made plans for our stay in the city and look forward to more time together with Maite and her family.

We have to search for a free WIFi spot to upload this so a bunch may come in at once. At 25$ a megabit you don't send a lot of big files here over the cel network.

Its been a long and tiring first day of traveling but it looks like we're off to a great start.



No comments:

Post a Comment