Monday, October 17, 2011
Lucca, Italy to Milano, Italy
Big day today, gotta make up for our laid back time yesterday.
First to breakfast, keeping it light but taking along a few supplies for the train journey. Then loading up the bags in the rental car, and a trip to the gas station to fill up the tank. Then down the road to the Eurocar agency that we found yesterday, to drop the car. That went well, a drop off charge that wasn't bad, plus an extra day's rental. Should have returned it yesterday, but it would have been a hard walk back to the hotel and I wanted the rental return agreement to verify that it was returned in good order. Which it was. Anyway, we can turn our back on the car now knowing we are covered. As usual, I took pictures of the 'delivered' condition.
Then a quick cab ride to Lucca train station, and bought the tickets on the regional train to Firenze followed by the Inter City train from Firenze to Milano.
Then sat down on a sunny platform in the morning to wait an hour for the train. The train came, we got on with our bags with less difficulty than we feared, and the journey was duly made to Firenze. There, we were supposed to have an hours wait, but the train was delayed by 110 minutes. Rats. No matter, time passes in due course whether we watch the clock or not, and eventually we got on the train with our baggage full of coffee mugs from our trip. Again, less trouble than we feared getting aboard, storing the bags, and offloading to the platform in Milano. Once in the station, instead of exiting directly to the outside world of the street, we went further downstairs to the ticket counter and bought our tickets on the train from Milano to Paris. We chose to give ourselves a bit of a break so we picked the 19th to travel on instead of tomorrow. That'll give us some rest time tomorrow.
In Milano we moved on the 800 meters to our hotel with relative ease, found the place, checked in, went out and had a late dinner at a spagetti/pizza joint nearby, then went to sleep for the night. Tomorrow we have to shift hotels, unfortunately, but it can't be helped as the hotel is full as is most of Milano just now, with tourists and conventions.
