I can’t believe I’m actually upright and coherent, but here I am at my aunt’s beautiful country home, a delicious glass of wine by my side, and I’m thinking I may even be able to stay awake until something resembling a normal bedtime.
(Although I may not be as coherent as I think I am…I had to correct about fourteen typos in that one sentence, and I’m in no way confident that I got them all…)
The travel was about as smooth as travel can be, in this day and age, considering I had a horrid itinerary (because the trip was free on air miles, and miles-users can’t be choosers). I ordered the shuttle to pick me up at noon-oh-five, and damned if he didn’t pull up right then. My flight from Portland to Chicago was a tad bit late, but there was enough room in the schedule that that wasn’t a problem (except that I didn’t get time to dawdle in duty-free and buy cigarettes for Auntie).
Then the flight from Chicago to Munich was….well, dreadful, but exactly as expected: coach seat, back of the plane, completely full flight, 8 hours in a sardine tin. I tried to sleep but only the very last part of the flight actually coincided with what my body considered to be Sleeping Time, and my body also considers that Sleeping Time should be in a Proper Bed, not bolt-upright in a sardine tin. So MAYBE I got an hour of really crappy sleep, I dunno.
THEN, the very good news was that we got into Munich about 20 minutes early, which turned my well-nigh-impossible 40-minute connection into an entirely doable hour connection, and I made the Milan flight no problem. (Ha, La Enigma and Consort, you laughed at me, but I was right!)
The flight from Munich to Milan was only an hour long, and went over the gorgeous snowy Alps. The Alps!
And then the weirdest thing was, when we got to Milan, we just walked off the plane and that was that. My aunt was waiting, and we hied off to her car and were off, me still clutching my passport in confusion. Later, we talked about it, and I realized that, although I’ve been to Europe since there’s been an EU, I haven’t traveled *between* European countries since there’s been an EU, and that that little token passport-stamping I got in Munich as I changed planes was good for the whole deal.
Cool. 🙂
It’s wonderful to see my aunt–I haven’t seen her in almost two years, and haven’t visited her here in way longer than that–she’s lived in this house since 2005, and I hadn’t ever seen it. (We did travel together in the south of Italy a few years back.) She lives in a suburb of a suburb of Cremona, if you want some idea of where I am. Photos to come when I get the phone thing figured out….