Travel With Me Tuesday: Goodbye to Italy, Once Again

It was fun wrapping up this trip in scrapping land which is not always the case. But making the pages reminded me of how many good things did happen and that not all the days were hard. I still could recall how difficult the walking was and how much I realized I needed surgery. We all have to learn things at our own pace.

This one was going to be two long journalers but that map took more space than I realized so a full page it became.

One just for pretty. His espresso and my ciocalatti.

Then came the true last day and our trip back to Malpensa airport in Milan.  All those cities on the Departures board were fascinating. There were some places I'd never even heard of and I thought I knew the world! Ha!

Once we got to NYC we had a hell of a time getting back to our own home but that was a lesson we learned. A cheap flight out of JFK is not always a good deal. Time = money or exhaustion. Bed never looked so good as early morning we got home.

AAM Monday: A Journey of 1000 Steps

A Journey of 1000 Steps always has an end. Eventually.

Sometimes that end can be a long time in the coming though. Last year, we spotted bargain prices of $800. RT from New York to Milan. The Emirates flight also left at 10pm which is a civilized time to cross the pond. Great we thought, and booked a trip. Ha! Just as there are no free lunches, and time is money, we learned that our bargain in $s ended up costing us a lot in time and exhaustion.

The going is never the biggest issue, it's the return even if it is a duplicate of the beginning. However this going itself involved a lot of hassle. Much to our consternation we learned that there were no convenient flights from BWI to JFK that did not include a 7hr layover til our Emirates flight left for Milan. Ok, then we'd take the train as we often did when we flew out of Newark. Hmmm...the train took us to Penn Station where we then took the Long Island Railway to the Jamaica stop and then took the AirTrain to the Emirates terminal for our 10pm flight to Milan.  Leave our home just before noon, and fly out at 10 - that layover didn't sound so bad by the time we got to the Emirates terminal.

Surprise surprise...there are no seats inside or outside the Emirates area. Ok, there were 6 on each side of the area just before you went through security. I snagged one (thank you God!) and my dh went on through to the security side. Did I mention that we'd had a laugh thinking we were flying to Italy on St. Patrick's Day? Did we both forget that New Yorkers like to celebrate the day in a truly liquid way? and that it snowed/rained on St. Patrick's Day this year on the east coast? Oh well.

Milan was a breeze in it's own Italian way upon arrival. As soon as you clear the things you need to clear, there is an escalator to the train into Milan and a ticket machine as well as a ticket booth. Done. The train takes you to the main train station in Milan and there you are. Up an escalator and you have arrived.

Coming home? The Economist has an article about what they call America's Awful Airports. It had been a while since I flew in or out of JFK. Now I know why that was. Even back in 1976, my xh and I chose to fly into Boston rather than JFK when we were arriving with our two sons and adopted daughter. Boston welcomed us and made the immigration paperwork for our Thai daughter a breeze.

I won't go into details of our return other than to say it took even longer, and it's the repeated little things that wear down your soul. e.g. at Malpensa, the Milan airport, the luggage carts are free. At JFK they cost $5. etc etc.  Oh did I mention there are seats outside the security area at Malpensa? Lots of seats? and that at JFK we waited in a line to scan our US passports at a terminal ourselves, have our photo taken at that terminal, got a printed 'receipt' with that photo and then waited in another line to have our passport and that receipt/photograph inspected? Eventually, the customs people took that receipt/photo so I can't show you how stunned I looked. We escaped from JFK around 8pm and eventually arrived at our own door at 02:45 the following morning.

$800. was not the bargain we thought it was. Live and learn.

Starting that Italy Album

I thought I had better get going with the album from our recent trip to Italy before the memories vaporize. When the trip started, I had great intentions of using Day One to record thoughts as the day went on and in the evening. My intentions were certainly good, and so were my actions for a few days. But once again, I didn't follow through. It isn't as if our days were so exhausting or filled with so much activity, but for whatever reason, the good habit of the early days went to hell and a hand-basket.

Looking at my lack of written notes for a lot of the days, I figured I had better get going before other life ideas pushed the memories out the door. I had planned to do a bit more planning of the album, but when I got this free template by email from Get It Scrapped and downloaded the new files from The Daily Digi , I decided just to get going.  I'm going to think a bit more on the following pages but this one was fun, and that's the point.

btw, this is one of the very few layouts I've done as a two-pager. While I usually try to get the adjacent pages to either match or at least work together,  I really don't do much with a full 2 page layout in one page. That's why this one has very few extras. I just wasn't in the mood for 40-50 layers! That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

24 hours in Milan

We walked, we walked some more, we dabbled in a museum, we ate right by our hotel, and we fell into bed to sleep soundly. A good start to a trip in my mind. btw, I'm loving  this PicFrame app for my phone. Have you tried it???

This is Pretty Typical

Happy man in Milano

Sounds of Milan

Wait for the Crunch