Milan to Tirano

Dear Gentle Readers

Yesterday we left Venice (sadly) for Milan. This involved waiting in an incredible line of vehicles waiting to get on the ferry back to the mainland. We missed the first ferry by just one car and that car pushed in in front of us instead of going to the back of the line and we had to wait another 40 minutes for the next ferry to arrive. After that it was a 3 hour drive on the Autostrada again, often at 135km/h but still with BMWs, Audis and the odd Alfa Romeo zipping past us.

Arriving in Milan was a nightmare to drive, with roads paved with bricks making for a very bumpy ride, the usual mad Italian drivers, absolutely confusing road layouts and narrow in places. Without Google Maps I seriously wonder how we would have made it in the paper map era. As usual, there is no parking supplied by the hotel so we had to park in the nearest public one. The entrance to the car park was a very narrow, very steep curving driveway that I had to negotiate our Peugeot down without hitting the sides. With Victoria guiding me from her side, we literally scraped in to be met by an effervescent parking attendant who enquired as to how long we were staying. After confirming one day he pointed to a car space that I somehow shoehorned the Peugeot into. Trouble is once I did, I could not open the door far enough to get out! Fortunately the attendant saw my predicament and let us park in a disabled bay from which I was able to safely disembark.

Wisely leaving our heavy suitcases in the car, we took our carryon luggage and set off for our hotel. Google Maps led us to a location and we looked around and couldn't see our hotel. Finally after wandering up and down a bit, Victoria tried a door and we found our hotel, after a gentleman exiting the building said "6th floor". The elevator is one I have never encountered before, it has a door that swings open to reveal the lift. Once the door is closed and the floor selected, only then do the conventional internal doors close. At the sixth floor, the procedure is reversed.

There we met a gentleman who showed us to our room, explained how the locks worked, said we could order breakfast for the morning and promptly disappeared. Victoria decided we needed to do some washing so we looked online for a laundry service and found one nearby. When we said we needed it by tomorrow, he looked incredulously at us and said "Tomorrow? No, next week". He then said Laundry Lounge, not far down that way. Nearly 2 km later we found it and managed to decipher the instructions with the help of ChatGPT. Tell you what, the AI has been invaluable with help all through the holiday. You have to buy tokens, 2 for a euro. We had just enough euros for a wash cycle, detergent and drying with a few tokens left over, which we gifted to a lady as we were never going to use them again. She was very grateful, "Grazie, grazie" she said effusively.

We passed this church and decided to pop inside and this spectacular dome was on display. I can't remember the name of the church but it was definitely Roman Catholic as everyone leaving was genuflecting.

Then it was the long walk back but we stopped at a restaurant halfway back to eat (and rest our tired feet) before continuing back to our hotel, where we watched a movie on Netflix for the first time this holiday, every other time we were too exhausted and just crashed.

I didn't sleep well that night, worried about how much Hertz was going to charge for the damage to the front wheel trim. Visions of €2,900 excess kept dancing in my head. When we opened the door next morning, a delightful Asian lady was waiting for us to order breakfast, with a very handy picture of all the choices available, which made the language barrier non-existent. She returned shortly after with everything on a tray and we ate on the balcony to our room.

With heavy heart and a racing pulse, we retrieved our car from the car park, and somehow managed to extricate it through the very narrow winding exit path and out into the mad Milan traffic. I stopped at a petrol station, fiddled with the automatic petrol pump and managed to get it going. Most petrol stations are not manned and you have to select the pump, pay up in front, then pump your fuel. With all the instructions in Italian and a most unhelpful recorded voice also in Italian, it really is amazing I succeeded.

I dropped Victoria off at the Milan Centrale (pictured here) with our bags and drove off to return the car to Hertz. Found the place, but it was in a carpark on the 5th level, but was another one of those really narrow ones, so navigating the levels was a real challenge. I just got to the fifth floor when I heard a crunch from the right hand side and I thought, "Great, made it all this way only to dent it on return". I got out of the car expecting the worst only to find no damage and only the fuel flap open, which I quickly closed.

Then came the moment of judgement - the assessor came over to look at the car and the damage to the front wheel trim. He looked at and said, "That's OK, we can get that fixed easily" and he charged me only €247, including all the other fees. I was very thankful for that and it certainly took a load off my mind.

I walked the short distance back to the train station and found Victoria. A man had helped her with our suitcases up to the concourse and she had said "We have no cash" but he didn't listen. When they got there he expected a tip but she had no cash and he got angry. That's OK, they shouldn't take on jobs that have no assurance of payment. We won that battle.

We bought our tickets, only €12.50 each and boarded the train to Tirano. It was a 2 hour 30 minute ride with incredible scenery of high mountains, lakes and very steep vineyards carved into the side of the mountains.

Arrived at Tirano and our hotel was within cooee of the train station (or so we thought). Turns out that is just the check-in site. Our actual room was a good block and a half away but at least the staff helped us to drag our bags up to the room

This is the view from our balcony.

This is looking the other way.

This was our shower, it was glorious. At last a decent shower. Didn't want to get out of it.

Our room was called the Dubai Room, can you tell from the mural above our bed?

The bed was very comfortable and we slept well. It was massive, could have fitted four adults comfortably.

We dined at the Bernina Hotel restaurant, very nice food and again for breakfast which was also very good.

Our run of good weather has run out, very overcast and raining all day. Our luggage, or should I say, Victoria's luggage is too heavy for the two domestic flights we will take on this trip, so she offloaded about 4kg of clothes and I included one of my three jackets and we posted them back to Australia. When I say we, I mean me, I walked the 8 minutes to the Post Office in the rain (we had borrowed an umbrella from the hotel), waited in the queue and used Google Translate to explain what I needed. The officer brought out a large box which just fitted all our clothes, I filled in the interminable paperwork and for the bargain price of €103 ($169) I posted it back to our house.

That might seem expensive but the penalties for overweight luggage with Swiss and Qantas would have exceeded that easily, plus Victoria's case is a lot easier to handle now.

Tomorrow we catch the Berlina Red Train across the Swiss Alps to St Moritz in Switzerland.