Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Day of Travel: Czech to Germany to Italy


Wednesday, April 4th

Today was a day of travel. We drove from Prague to Munich thru some freshly snow dusted forests – beautiful. Once back inside Germany I pulled out my Kraftwerk CD. “Autobahn” on the Autobahn – nice. The perfect accompanying score…

Near Munich we stopped off at Dachau and toured the memorial. A bit of a more somber experience.

We dropped off the car at the Munich airport. We started with a brand new car, and took it from 4km to 1969km in 6 days. Bye bye car, it was fun, but it will be nice not to have to worry about parking or freeway passes…

We walked out on the tarmac to our “Air Dolomiti” flight. I love boarding the plane on the tarmac, it feels like more of a travel adventure and less like a commute flight.

After a short flight over the Swiss Alps we landed at the Milan airport. For some reason, the Milan airport is not in Milan. It’s about an hour away. We took the airport shuttle bus into town, but with the evening commute traffic, it was slow going. So slow we missed our train to Venice. There was one other that we were able to take. The only problem (unforeseen and unmentioned) was that this train did not take us directly to the island as our first train did. Instead we needed to catch a second train at the Venice mainland station. Well, once we arrived there and disembarked the train, it was evident we weren’t on the island. We figured out we needed to board the connecting train just as it pulled out. In fact, the last train out for the night. D’oh. Hmm… what to do? We went to a hotel across from the station and asked. They pointed us to a bus stop that had busses that went across the bridge every ½ hr. Thank goodness… We caught the bus with about a dozen other passengers and rode it in. About midnight we finally crossed the “Ponte Degli” on foot over the Grand Canal and found out hotel – Whew!