My apologies for the confusion on the blog post yesterday!  Since I accidentally posted it early it sent the email out at that point.  But when I posted the finished version it did not send out an updated email.  So for those of you that may have missed it, here is the link to yesterday’s post:

Easter isn’t over!! – Road to Emmaus

As the title of this post probably indicates, we spent most of the day on the road. 🚌🚄🚞🚌 Our plane tomorrow morning leaves from Milan so we had to get from Florence to Milan today, as there would not be enough time tomorrow.

So we got up this morning, finished packing and went to breakfast around 8:30. Then we got our bags from our room and checked out of the Villa and caught the 9:37 bus into town.  It takes about 45 minutes to get from the Villa to the Florence Santa Maria Novella train station.  So we got to the station around 10:20 or so.  Our train was scheduled to leave at 11:45 so we had just over an hour to wait (a lot of traveling in Italy is a hurry up and wait game!  You have to leave early so you can be sure you aren’t late, but the once you arrive you typically have to wait for a bit!)

We grabbed lunch at the train station to bring with us on our way to Milan.  We took another fast train from Florence SMN to Milano Porta Garibaldi, that was about a 2 hour train ride and we arrived around 1:50.  Once we got into the station we went inside to figure out how to get from Porta Garibaldi to Milano Malpensa Aeropuerto.  We were able to get tickets on the intracity train and there was one leaving at 2:05 and one at 2:35, so we ran down the platform and got to the train just as the platform attendant started blowing his whistle!  We made the 2:05 just barely!

We wouldn’t have been cutting it quite as close had we been able to find the ticket validation machine!  When you are traveling by train through Italy, unless you get on a train that has assigned seats (which is only the fast trains) you have to validate your ticket before you board.  The tickets for the intracity trains don’t actually tell you what time the train departs or what the train number is, it is just a general boarding pass that you can use to get from what ever city you are in to the location designated on the ticket itself.  When you validate the ticket It puts a time/date stamp on the ticket so they know you actually bought a new ticket and aren’t just reusing the same ticket over and over again.  If you don’t validate before getting on board you are charged a fee when they come around to check your ticket.  There were several sitting near us that did not validate and got charged the fee.

The train ride from Porta Garibaldi to Malpensa took about 40 minutes.  Once we arrived at the airport we thought we would get checked into our flight, so we asked at an information desk where the Delta desk was and we were informed it was at the complete opposite side of the airport. While we were there we also asked where we could catch the shuttle to our hotel.  So we walked all the way down to the Delta desk…only to discover that it was closed for the day…so we walked all the way back to the other end where the shuttle bus would pick us up.

We hopped on the shuttle and arrived at our hotel.  Tonight we are staying in a Holiday Inn Express (so I am sure we will be smarter tomorrow morning when we wake up! 😉)

Once in our room we were both pretty tired so we just laid down and chilled for a few hours.  We read and took advantage of the wifi to surf Facebook.  I tried to watch Hulu, but apparently it isn’t available in Italy because when I tried to log in I got an error that it wasn’t available in this region…

Around 6:00 we started getting hungry so we looked up and found a restaurant about 6 minutes walking distance from the hotel.  So we started walking there, but when we got there we discovered they didn’t open until 7:00!  Still pretty hungry we decided to find something else.  So we actually walked over to the Crowne Plaza and ate there!  We both agreed it was probably our best meal in Italy!!  We decided that since it was our last real meal here we would treat ourselves to the whole meal experience.

We started with a bottle of wine and a Prosciutto with Bufala Mozzarella antipasto.   

  For my first course I had Lasagna Bolognese:

For second course I had seared beef with potatoes: 

 It was all delicious!  Now we are back at the hotel getting ready for bed and suffering from food comas!!  We calculated that tomorrow we will spend approximately 13 hours on planes, so we are taking advantage of the comfortable beds and getting to bed early tonight!

Today I only walked 8,979 steps, which is 3.75 miles – most of our day was spent on trains and busses!

Good night from our last night in Italy!!  I am not quite ready to come home yet, but I am ready to sleep in my own bed again! 😁😁