Venice to Milan

We got up again without an alarm clock and had breakfast by 9am.  Duanna, our housekeeper at the hotel, told us that the entire process to get to Milan and to the airport would take 6 hours.  As the plane leaves at 6:30pm, we decided to get a move on and get out there.  We packed our cases and trundled over

only 3 bridges on the way to St. Mark’s Square to get the number 1 vaporetto down the grand canal to get all the pictures we wanted.  It was still cold today, but there was some sun at times and you were able to stand in the open air and get pictures on the boat.  We got to see the tables out and some pictures of the high water lapping at stone steps and creeping into St. Marks as seen in the pictures.  We cruised the Grand Canal at a slower pace than expected because of all the traffic on it that morning. 

We had planned on catching the 11:03 train to Milan, but

didn’t make it to the train station until 10:45am and I didn’t think that we would able to figure out the tickets, validate them, and get to the train platform before this train left, but miracle of miracles, we did.  (And that was with the machine not accepting our credit card and having to start over and use cash).  Upon boarding, we ran into a couple from Toronto on the train who were on the Destiny cruise, but we never ran into them on the ship.  We talked for a while of Michigan, Canada etc until we hit another train station and picked up some serious numbers on this train.  It went from 10 people to a car to standing room only and stayed that way the rest of the trip. 

We had planned to get on the metro from the train station to get to the train station in Milan that had an express to the airport, but our Canadian friends had a newer Italy book that made it clear that there were options to the airport from our train station.  We were able to find the ticket booth, purchase a ticket, and ask about the platform before the next train left for the airport, for all of 10 minutes spent in Milan’s Central Train station.  I have to admit, I was feeling really good about our ability to navigate all of these changes in a foreign country.  On the way in to Milan on the train, it was easy to track how the snow that was expected was changing things and I wondered if we would be way ahead of our plane…

Into the Milan airport and found out that our British airline only allows one carryon that has to fit in the space of a briefcase (seriously people an old fashioned latched brief case size thing and that includes your purse), so we had to check another bag that we were expecting to be carryon.  John went to go purchase another checked bag, while I waited at the counter and he came back in a run because he had read that they close boarding 30 minutes before the flight and we hadn’t made it through security yet. 

Through security and there is no gate number by our flight which is disconcerting, but we grab some food for the first time since breakfast, except for snacks that I had packed my purse with thank God, and then I send John a second time to find someone and ask about our gate.  Turns out that our plane just left Madrid and they are not expecting it for the next two hours, which leaves us wondering if our hotel in Amsterdam will wait for us, if there will be metro service when we finally land and leaving John in a very bad mood.  I’m still riding a high from it being easier to get to our airplane in Milan via Venice than to get to Miami from Fort Lauderdale, while he is irritated that we had to check extra baggage, the airplane is late and all the other things.  This is such a change from how things usually are, I’m always bitching, venting and upset and John is the calm one.  I don’t know how to handle this reversal for a while and all of my attempts at levity fall short. 

He goes to check the big board again to see if we have a gate yet, but then comes back even more angry because he found an internet machine that was one euro for 5 minutes and he thought that he could at least contact the hotel in that time, but the machine has a european keyboard and he can’t figure out how to type the @ symbol, which makes it impossible for him to do anything.  At this point, I hand him my trashy romance novel which has gotten to a good part and have him read a couple of pages, which at least puts a smile on his face and the rest (hotel, plane, metro in Amsterdam) we’ll just figure that out later.