The Never Ending Journey

In retrospect we possibly could have shortened our trip to Milan by one day, but there is a large shopping area that we have barely touched so we will probably do that tomorrow.  We started our visit with the most obvious spot, the Cathedral. Located in a large Piazza it must’ve one of the largest in Italy, if not Europe. We restricted our visit to the main body of the building and the archeology site in the basement ,the actual museum being closed on the day of our visit. They did offer an elevator ride or stair climb to the rooftop. However wehave seen more than enough panoramic views of many European cities. How different could this one be.   During the next 3 days we covered a variety of sights including Storza Castle with its sweeping gardens and three floors of very impressive museums.  A visit to the Museum of Science and Technology gave us a view of several models of Leonardo da Vinci models based on his actual plans. It also featured a l...

Dinner last night (Sept 30th) was at a lakeside restaurant where we watched the sun slowly drop behind the mountains as we dined on crepes, a well deserved change from pasta, pasta, pasta. We checked out of our “prison cell” and stowed our luggage at the Tourist Information booth for a couple of hours while we explored the nearby monastery gardens. The train to Milan took a little over an hour getting to Central Station and we spent a similar amount of time getting to our hotel. We didn’t realize until we were already there that the location of the hotel  supplied by my mapping program was at the complete opposite end of the street from its actual location. Susanna was rather unimpressed by the time we covered the additional 0.9km required to reach our lodgings.  On the plus side, we did get to see some beautiful buildings but I don’t think she cared.     Our accommodations, the Hotel Goldoni covers a couple of floors in a very large building ...

Our first night in a Varenna did find us tossing and turning due to the lack of any kind of breeze and the heat. Our room did not have air conditioning so we resorted to running the bathroom fan all night just to pull a little air through the room.  Somebody must have been on the take to get this place rated 8.2 out of 10 on Booking.com. Breakfast was individually packaged sweet buns and Melba toast with crappy coffee. I’ve had better food from a vending machine.  After a quick walk along the lakefront we took the ferry over to the town of Bellagio, some 15 minutes distant.  While we were buying our tickets an American tourist was “losing his shit” demanding compensation for yesterday’s situation with the air show. Apparently he was tired of waiting in line for the ferry from Menaggio back to Varenna so he hired a private boat. He was making all kinds of threats about posting negative reviews in all the US travel magazines and getting louder and louder as people ar...

Our trip here from Palermo took a little longer than planned but I had sort of expected that. But RyanAir was not the culprit. in fact they landed at Milan Malpensa about 15 minutes early, giving us more than enough time to connect with our 1:20 train out of Milano Centrale, the main train station.   Things progressed smoothly until the town of Lecco, near the southern tip of the lake.   After stopping here for an unscheduled 15 minutes we set off again, only to stop for a similar length of time at the next station. We were supposed to proceed to Varenna directly with no additional stops but we ended up stopping at all 5 of the following stations, apparently due to the massive crowds trying to leave the town. It turned out that the entire rail system in the area was at an almost complete standstill due to the crowds attending the annual Airshow which, unbeknown tours was just happening.     We finally arrived in Varenna almost 90 minutes late for what was supposed...