Our trip to Italy!
When Sam's April schedule came out at the end of March, for the first time since his Captain upgrade (November 2006), he had some weekends off. We agreed on Dublin, Ireland. Mid April, Sam was called for jury selection the last week in April. This caused a potential problem of not being able to fly out Friday night. We decided to add St. John's, Canada to the destination list. Sam never had to appear for jury duty, both St. John's and Dublin had horrible weather in the forecast, and the loads were full coming home. Thursday at 4pm, we decided to go to Milan, Italy.
Our alarm went off at 5am to make a 6:59am flight out of DCA to EWR. We sat at the EWR airport until our 5:30pm flight departed. Sam and I got the last two seats in First Class. We were served a 5 course meal and attempted to sleep the last 4 hours of the 8+ hour flight.
We arrived in Italy at 8am - 6 hours ahead of DC. We took a taxi to The Malpensa Inn Motel and slept for 5 hours.
We took a bus into Milano Centrale at Piazza Duca d' Aosta, walked around, ate a meal, and walked around some more.
Everyone smokes in Italy. 90% of the vehicles are compact (we saw several smart cars) with 40% of the traffic being motorcycles. McDonald's in Italy is equivalent to Starbucks in the USA - on every corner. We went to bed when it got dark to switch over to the time zone.
Our hotel had free contintental breakfast - this included a cup of cappuccino.
We figured out Milan's Metro system without getting lost. Our first site of the day was Milan Duomo: the world's largest Gothic cathedral. The cathedral is amazing! It was the favorite part of the trip for the both of us.
We ate pizza for lunch.
We walked around Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II - a huge vaulted tunnel shopping mall.
We later payed 5 euro each to walk the stairs to the top of the Cathedral.
Next we walked to Castello Sforzesco - a huge fortress (the museum portion was closed).
Our last stop was the park where we turned around to eat near the Galleria.
We got to the airport at 8:30am. They guard their international ticket counter. The flight was very full (no first class this time), but luckily we were able to sit by each other. They fed us twice during the 8+ hour flight. We landed at 1:30pm - customs was a breeze and we were able to get on the delayed 3pm flight to DCA. Daylight lasted forever - as Sam told me it would.
I hoped you enjoyed reading about our trip to Italy! I finally have stamps in my passport!
