I couldn't see any point in fiddling around at the hotel in the morning. I'd rather get to the airport, and fiddle around there, waiting for my flight. So I ate breakfast, and checked out. I needed to pay an occupancy tax that wasn't included in the bill, and I offered her my credit card. She said it should be cash, so I offered her a 50 euro bill. Remember me saying that Italians don't like to make change? She asked me if I didn't have anything smaller, and I told her I was saving that for the taxi.
Given the choice between putting it on my card and taking a 50 (what I owed was in the neighborhood of 15), she decided to put it on my card.
She called me a cab, and while we were standing around as I waited, she asked me what part of the US I was from, and expressed sympathy over the Boston marathon bombing. I told her I surely wished people could manage to settle their differences without hurting each other.....
The cab showed up quickly, and the ride to the airport was quick. Twenty minutes-ish.
I was early. I looked around for one of those places where you can weigh your bags (and possibly re-pack), but didn't see one. I was pretty sure my bag couldn't weigh anything like 50 pounds (or 22 kilos, take your choice), but I wondered.....
They wouldn't check my bag until within two hours of my flight, so I had about 45 minutes to cool my heels.
Dum de dum de dum.............. La, la, la.......
Hey, look here. What's this?
It turns out my excellent traveling backpack (with waist belt, so the weight is on my pelvis, not my shoulders) has its very own rain jacket. Who knew.
When it was two hours before my flight, I checked my bag. The counter person didn't want to take it, as it was still two hours before my flight. I told her one of her colleagues said they'd take it at 10:30, and it was 10:35. She looked it up and decided she could take it. And it was only 14.7 kilos, so no weight issues.
Then I hunted up the airport farmacia, to see if I could get something to help unstuff my head, so nothing would explode on the the airplane (because of my cold). Unfortunately, she told me she couldn't help me. (Note to self -- travel with some capsaisin capsules....)
Here we are, getting ready to leave Milan. I was never aware of seeing the Unicredit Tower when I was right in town, but there it is, in the distance.....
I don't think Air Malta flies to Detroit, but maybe they do.
I recognized the train station from the plane, but didn't realize what else I could see when I took this pic. Scrutinizing what I can see on Google maps, and looking at the street view, and asking my daughter if our hotel was in the east side of Corso Buenos Aires, or the west side, I believe I have identified exactly where everything really was.
The subway stop I used when I came back from the cathedral was about two blocks from our hotel, just as I thought. I have no idea where I went, but it must have taken me at least an hour to get from the subway exit to the hotel.
Now I know I was wrong about which end of our hotel's block was Corso Buenos Aires, which was a major part of my confusion.
Oh well.
All of my wandering around in this part of town found me that nice big grocery, so it wasn't all bad...........
Headed mostly north (and a tiny bit west) to Amsterdam.
That's Lugano, sticking out into ... Lake Lugano. (Looking west, as we were flying north, and I was on the left side of the plane.)
The Alps. Made of rock. And covered in ice and snow. Very big, compared to Italian hills I stood on top of.
This is not a gentle or kind countryside.....
We crossed over the Alps in about 20 minutes.
This is the Untersee (German for Lower Lake). According to Wikipedia, it "is the smaller of the two lakes that together form Lake Constance and forms part of the boundary between Switzerland and Germany."
A much softer countryside, as we approach Schiphol.
Hey, look! A golf course! On "the big screen" I can even see that there are people playing the course.
Schiphol.
In order to facilitate chronological traversal of these posts, here is a link to the next post.
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