Monday, November 5th, 2007
We left our dreamy three days in the Alps, and we arrived 3.5 hours later to return the rental car. We realized that the gas gauge was not registering the diesel, and Europcar didn’t seem to care. Super…hopefully our charge card doesn’t see the end of that.
We had over two hours to walk and check out Nice, so after putting our luggage in the train station lockers, we were on our way to explore. We found the pedestrian street, and grabbed lunch at Sully’s Mom’s place, Linda’s. It was a cute sandwich and salad shop. Katie was excited to have a turkey sandwich, as Dermot got the turkey club. To our dismay, the strawberry tiramisu was …frozen, and rather nasty. Just our luck… to try an Italian dessert in France.
We continued our walk down to the beach, where the weather was in the 70s and people were definitely taking advantage. We made our way back up to the train station to catch our 6+ hour train to Milan. One of the highlights was this woman climbing onto the train at one of the stops with no joke, three huge rolling bags. And she was by herself. And she didn’t know how to read her train ticket. Wow. Dermot (being the kind gentleman that he is) offered to help carry her bags to her proper seat (which was one car back).
After what seemed like 12 hours and several LONG unnecessary stops, we arrived back into Italy!
Italy was not as happy to see us…as we arrived in the evening to find that that the tourist office closed at 8pm. Thanks Milan. So, we attempted to find our hotel on our own… which took a good 1.5 hours, when it’s about a 20 minute walk. Needless to say our backs were aching from our sacks, and we were very ready for a nice Italian dinner.
We stumbled upon a garden/nursery, which also had a restaurant/café. We looked like such locals that we got the Italian menu. We caved and asked for “Inglese” and noticed that we would not have ordered what we truly wanted…. Katie got croquettes and risotto, very similar to a dish they made at her Tuscan cooking school. Dermot thought he ordered pork and realized that it was served like much of the meat in Italy, raw. Both dishes were very good, and we ended with classic Tiramisu to make up for the frozen variety we experienced at Lunch.
On Tuesday, we decided to sleep in and have ‘brunch’ at the Google Milan Office. As the tourist office was closed and our fancy 1 star hotel did not have maps, we had to ‘wing it’ to find the office…which ended up taking over an hour. We did successfully charge the Italian Cell phone (being borrowed from Katie’s parent’s friends, THANK YOU!)
We finally arrived around 1:00pm (13:00) to eat and mix and mingle with the Milan Googlers. We decided to take full advantage of the secure Internet connection by doing some ‘work’ as well as trying to work out the third and final stage of the ‘two tickets around the world’ trip. We called Continental’s Round the World Ticket desk….for approximately 6 hours… and spoke with Judy and Julie to help get our Jan- August 2008 tickets booked.
After spending our full day in the “office,” Dermot played FIFA 2006 on the projector while Katie updated this lovely website. As we made our way home around midnight, Dermot indulged in America’s prized export… the Big Mac.