0 km today.
0 km this trip.
3507.2 km from start.
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2012-06-02-000-Bus-and-Walk.kml
2012-06-02-000-Flight.kml
2012-06-02-000-Bus-and-Walk.gpx
2012-06-02-000-Flight.gpx
A routine journey
The journey was routine and for once at a civilised time of day. The airport parking shuttle bus had a new form of torture. First repeated health and safety announcements just in case anyone didn't know how to ride on a bus. And then it got worse. There were adverts for duty free repeated over and over again. Sadly the speakers were well concealed or they would have had their guts ripped out.
The Ryanair flight to Milano (Bergamo) was at 2pm. In-flight entertainments included a screaming baby for a while but much worse were the adverts urging everyone to chillax with some brand of drink. What funt made up that portmanteau word? Then the woman in the row behind started. She sounded quite knowledgeable but on paying closer attention, almost everything she said was factually wrong. This culminated with her admiration of the Pyrenees while crossing Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
The flight was on time and there was an express bus about to depart for Milano. Neil had bought his ticket on line. The driver scanned the printed barcode and he was allowed to get on. A few buses stop at Milano Lambrate right next to the hotel but Neil was happy to go to the central station and stroll back to the hotel. By 8pm he was settled into Hotel Gamma. Plug sockets had been located and various batteries were on to charge.
According to the Trenitalia website there is a through train to Broni at 06:32 arriving at 07:46. It's a 22 km walk so it should be possible to complete the walk before it gets too hot. This will be a nice change after the chilly Easter walks which included an episode of snow on one of the days.
Bus: EUR 9 because Neil bought a return by mistake. It should have been EUR 5.
On day three, the walking on this trip became much nicer than the two weeks in April. There were more back roads and there was a canal tow path on one of the days. There were more cycle and footpaths too so the walking was often pleasant. The weather was hot and humid with occasional thunder storms. It was not so hot that walking became unpleasant but it was near the upper limit. The umbrella got used quite frequently but dried out quickly too.
The terrain looked flat but was actually sloping uphill towards the Italian Alps. This was quite invisible but the drainage and irrigation channels had fast flowing water. The water would be almost still in truly level land. This was confirmed by the altitude logs from the hand-held GPS receiver. Also the rivers had weirs and rapids making them rather attractive. There was a lot of water flowing and the crops looked green and well watered.
The rail service was excellent, unlike the information on the Trenitalia website where you can't even find a map of the rail routes and station names. They have forgotten that non-locals don't know what is totally obvious to people who have lived there all their life. If their webmaster published a good SVG format route map with stations and also PDFs of all the local station departures and arrivals, it would be traveling nirvana. All this information is already available and posted at stations and on trains. It just needs converting and putting on the website. It should be possible to automate parts of the task. Maybe that will be Neil's retirement job after teaching.
Website problems: Please mail Neil.
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