British Airways Finally Gets It Right

Hi all! Sorry for the delay in a post, it has been a whirlwind of a few days. We are all well, safe, and exhausted from all of the adventures of the last few days.

The last we left you was on Monday and we were still unsure on whether we would make it out of London on the flight we had rebooked to Milan. Originally we were set to fly into Rome, but British Airways was not sure if they would have the Rome flights moving until Tuesday or Wednesday. Not wanting to delay our trip any more, we looked for any flights flying into any cities that we were semi familiar with. It turns out it is pretty difficult to book 4 people on the same flight after a global outage of an airline. We managed to get a flight for Monday to Milan instead and figured we could train it into Florence or Rome depending on where we could pick up the original itinerary. As it is, we are out the tickets we bought for the Vatican and the Borguese. But the more we can salvage the better!

Prior to our flight we spent the day working through some of the sites we wanted to see on our London city guides. Christyn really wanted to go to the Camden Market, so we took the metro out in that direction. On the metro a cute family of four sat next to us, and of course we go to chatting. They were on their way to see the Platform 9 3/4 a one of the train stations from the Harry Potter movies. Since Christyn is a huge fan, and it was in the general direction we wanted to go, we tagged along. We then made our way up to the Camden Market. This is an open air market with hundreds of permanent vendors selling all sorts of things. And it was hopping. We bought some Hungarian take-away food and walked around the market for a few hours. Then it was back to the hotel to collect our bags and make our way to the airport.

As it was, with the rebooked flight to Milan, we still had the worry that even if the flight took off we had no idea how we would get from the Linate airport to the city center, as the metro does not run out to Linate. And we didn't want to book a hotel for Milan until we were sure the plane would be taking off. So many ifs, and all hanging on one itty bitty little flight off of an island to the main land. :)

As it turns out, the flight did take off, we were on it, and we booked a hotel for Milan abut 5 minutes before we boarded the plane. Whew! We figured we could always get a taxi, but where is the adventure in that? After exiting the airport and collecting our luggage we learned that there was a #73 bus that could take you into the Duomo (the main church area) and then on the same tickets (they are good for 90 minutes of travel) we could metro to the hotel from there. We spent 20 minutes or so in the big piazza in front of the Duomo and walked through the galleria. Mind you we have our full packs still on. We seriously think that we should all earn at least one college PE credit by the time we are done with this entire trip! By the time we reached our hotel it was around 1am. We were hot and tired. We opted to plan for an early departure so that we could catch an early train out to Florence in the morning. By 5:45am we were out the door and back at the train station again. A bit of a brutal turn around, but we made it.

It is now 2:30am our time, so I will update you more on our Tuesday adventures in Florence and our Wednesday plans for Rome. Ciao!