Italy! What a country!?
   Our story begins, as many stories begin, with an unfortunate event. Our Virgin Atlantic flight arrived late on the 12th. Because we were continuing on from Heathrow to Milan, we needed to connect with our other flight in a different terminal. I probably could have guessed this, but I hadn’t really thought about the fact that we would have to go through security when switching terminals. English security is super tight and so the combination of a late arrival and a long security line equals missed flight. Air Italy (Alitalia) wouldn’t work with us since the ticket was issued by Virgin Atlantic. So, back to terminal 3 we went. Luckily we just walked through the line backwards to get to the ticket agents for Virgin. They booked us on a flight 5 hours later and then we went back through the security gates at Terminal 2. Luckily, I made a joke with one of the security guards at the front of the line on our first pass, and he recognized us. He did us a favor and bumped us to the “Fast Pass” line. Not like it mattered since our flight was so far off, but it was nice to not have to stand in the long, hot line again.
   We landed in Milan around 10ish and navigated our way out of the airport and onto a bus. We unknowingly didn’t buy a ticket assuming that we could buy one on the bus, but, we couldn’t, and, again, lucky us, there was a transit officer checking tickets. To our surprise, the man sitting behind us spoke English and he saved our asses. He handled the guards for us and after a flurry of Italian was passed between them, they let us off the hook. We asked him what he said and he said that there was some problem with the ticket machine at the airport and we wouldn’t have been able to buy tickets even if we wanted to. I’m not sure if he made that up, or if it was really the case, but we didn’t care, … we were free from a nasty situation. This nice man, Christian, then walked with us off the bus, into the underground rail station, and helped us figure the system out. We thanked him profusely and took our light rail train to the central train station, where we took a big train to Verona. We arrived in Verona around 12:30am, and took a taxi to our hotel. It was a long 24 hours of being awake and navigating a foreign system, but we eventually got there.
   Verona was pretty and neat and overall is was pretty neat. We figured out the local bus system and took a bus into the city center, a restricted traffic zone, and full of pretty churches and gelato shops….

and, I’ll tell you more about that later. There’s more to see and I’ve got to get going!

Ciao