Trip Catchup Take 1

As we've finally settled down enough to have some time to be home and post about our travels, it's time to get this blog up-to-date! I'm shocked to see that we have trips as far back as April that remain un-posted, so we'll have to try to knock a bunch out in a row. Get ready for lots and lots of sporadically labeled pictures.

Backlog Trip #1: York, UK (pictures here)

In what was probably our longest Peugeot road trip to date, we drove up to York in the north east of England for a 2 days and a night with our friend from Syria. York is known for its cathedral, the York Minster which was the first building to rise higher than the Great Pyramid, the highest structure in the world for 3500 years or so. York was really charming (though rainy while we were there) and you can definitely understand why everyone here would say it is the number 1 or 2 nicest English town. On the way back, we made a long detour to check out the longest bridge in England (5^th in the world?), the Humber Bridge, which was pretty amazing.

Backlog Trip #2: Northern Italy (pictures here)

Most of our British friends here are appalled by the number of sites and destinations that we cram into our trips, but I think our long weekend in Italy will stand as the high watermark of our insanity for some time. What began as a long weekend in Venice turned into what seemed like a competition to ride every mile of railway track in Northern Italy, as our travel map bellow suggests.

The trip began with a bit of recklessness from the start: over a 3 day UK holiday weekend I saw it was much cheaper to fly into Rimini south of Venice and out from Milan that direct to Venice, so I booked it. Upon further research, it turns out these locations are 4+ hours from Venice, but no matter, we had 3 nights and 3 days to do it all. We landed in Rimini, which is a tiny airport and the one taxi waiting left pretty quickly. After a 20 minute wait for the bus, I remembered the airport wasn’t THAT far from our hotel on google maps, and vaguely remembered we needed to walk to the beach then north. Off we went with all of our things in the backpack, and 4 hours later were still heading north, looking for any vehicle that looked even a little like a cab to collapse into. We did finally find our hotel (on foot), and got up early the next morning to spend a few hours on the beach before catching the train to Venice.

In Venice our travel challenges continued when our hostel was full and we needed to find a place to sleep for 2 nights of a very busy May weekend. Thankfully, a bookstore nearby had a sign out front advertising a B&B (beds and books). The owner showed us 8 beds he had set up in his storage room amidst hundreds and hundreds of Italian books and magazines. We smiled and said it was great.

After the challenges of getting there, Venice was well-worth our hardships and we loved it. The water everywhere, tiny winding streets on which you have to suck in let people pass, the food, and the architecture were all amazing. There really is nowhere like Venice. We had a great time taking boat trips out to two of the other islands in the Venetian Lagoon, Murano and Burano. Murano was the glass-making capital of Europe for centuries, and Burono is a fishing village with beautiful brightly-painted houses.

Our last and most extreme travel ‘hiccup’ occurred at the airport in Milan. The woman at the ticket counter kindly showed me that our return tickets had been purchased for a date 3 weeks in the future. DISASTER. At the Ryanair help desk, the attendant couldn’t even say out loud the price of 2 tickets for the flight leaving in 1 hour for Birmingham, she had to type the number into a calculator and slide it to me discreetly. Well, I guess the good news was we could stay in Italy to wait 3 weeks for the price of those tickets.

After a few dark and desperate hours, the airport internet café came through huge and we found a flight back to Birmingham from Pisa late the next day. Back on the train we went, making the 5 hour trip to Pisa and arriving late that night. We emailed our respective employers to tell them work the next day wasn’t going to work so well, and decided to make the most of the beautiful day and enjoy our impromptu visit to Pisa.

Checking our tickets 100 times and arriving at the airport 3 hours before our flight, we managed to board a plane out of Italy and breathed a sigh of relief when we touched down in England that night. It was truly an amazing/insane Italian adventure! I think our British friends are right, we are crazy.