11. Milano - Getting here

Our landlady's father turned up an hour early to check us out of Apartment 4, Level 4, 17 via Machiavelli, Roma.  

Paul sent him away and told him to come back at the agreed time of 8.45am.  

But his early arrival, together with my anxiety about insisting we do some train travel on this trip, further exacerbated by my claims to be able to manage all of my own baggage by myself, brought me to my knees.  

I really needed that final hour to recover from excruciating abdominal pain.  I used to get this anxiety reaction all of the time when I was working, but in retirement I seem to have been reasonably free of it. Obviously my mind and body considered that I was considerably stressed and should have a good lie down, before passing go and collecting $300 (our security deposit) from the landlady's father.

The taxi driver, however, was a young gentleman and dropped us right at the entrance to Termini, the major rail hub in Rome and only just up the road from via Machiavelli (1.5 kms). However the walk included a lot of cobblestones, broken pavement and traffic and I was concerned that my suitcase plus computer bag would be too heavy for me. 

We had pre-booked our seats on the FrecciaRossa - the very fast red train.  It runs express from Naples to Rome to Milan about four times per day.  We booked online and printed out our ticket a few days before leaving Australia.  It all worked perfectly.  Unlike the Eurail pass where (apparently) you need to covert your general booking to actual tickets at the ticket office prior to being allocated a seat, this was a direct booking.

Rome to Milan took 2 hours 50 minutes and reached speeds of 300kmh, averaging about 240kph. But I wouldn't know because after four consecutive sleepless nights worrying about whether I would be able to uphold my part of the "Lets go by train - I can manage my own bags" deal, I dozed off and saw nothing.

But I couldn't have really been asleep because I remember hearing each of the never ending stream of telephone conversations going on around me, for the whole journey.  An Italian with a mobile phone (or three mobile phones as the case may be) is a dangerous individual.

The apartment we booked in Milan using Bookings.com, which we have used extensively in the past, has proved to be less than satisfactory - but more about that later. It seems well positioned for the historical city centre but that might be the only good thing I can say about it.

So we went for a late afternoon walk, ostensibly looking for a supermarket to supplement the near non-existent supplies in the apartment (a little coffee, a little sugar, a lot of salt).   

We followed the tram lines and the locals finishing work and turned a corner and then another corner and wow! There it was in front of us! This is what we had come to see.  We bought tickets for tomorrow - apparently there is a terrace at the top somewhere - looking forward to that.

Fell into bed full of chicken and chips.  Not our usual fare, and we have both sworn that this is the one and only time we will eat this type of food this trip, but it's a long story, it's been a long day and all we want to do is to go to bed with something in our tummies.

Stay tuned ........