Duck's Deductions: European Adventure

A little over a month ago, I went on a week long European Adventure and I finally decided to blog about it. Aren't you so exited?!?!?!?!?!? I'm going to break it into separate blog posts for each day, so hope y'all enjoy it (this is about Day 1 and Day 2).

So this trip had been talked about for a while. My brothers, sister-in-law, and I all wanted to go to the Monaco Grand Prix (we are all F1 fans), so this trip was planned. My one brother and his wife were taking a 2 week vacation, while my other brother was going for 10 days. Then there was me who jumped in towards the last minute and was only taking 7 days (2 travel days and five actually in Europe). I knew with work I wasn't going to be able to do the whole trip, but I REALLY wanted to see the race!

It all started early one spring morning in the Georgia heat...okay, it wasn't actually that early in the morning or actually that hot for Georgia. :) We all left from out respective states and airports on a Wednesday morning (and documented it all by sending pictures to each other).

My brother...the only one at LAX

They might be a little excited

My airport actually had other people!

I started my adventure by driving to Jacksonville and got there a few hours early, which turned out to be a good thing because the line for security was LONG!!! I mean, I might have been able to park in Georgia and still be at the end of the line (okay, that may be a slight exaggeration). The good news was that the line was moving at a steady pace, but all around me I could hear people saying that they were going to miss their flights (I was questioning in my head why they would only get to the airport an hour before the flight, but I digress).

All the others caught their first flight and ended up in another country; I caught my first flight and ended up in...Miami. Yeah, not that exiting. I didn't even leave Florida! Though I have to say, Miami airport was a weird experience. I arrived at a gate (let's call it 64, cause I don't actually remember). Well it turns out gate 64 has like 24 gates in one, labeled 64A-64Z. WHAT?!?!? I ended up walking partially outside for like 10 minutes before actually making it into the main building. I think they ran out of money when building the airport to put 24 gates in one and have it mostly outside. But once again I digress.

Once in Miami, I got some food and hung out for a while. Then the most dreaded moment arrive..the 10hr plane ride. AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! One thing about me, I REALLY don't like planes. I'm not scared or nervous or anything. I just don't enjoy being stuffed on a plane for any amount of time. It's annoying (give me a fighter jet and I might change my mind, but commercial. No). Well, I ended up reading, watching Captain America and Black Panther (not my choices, but I couldn't pick my own movies), and slept for maybe 3ish hours. The awesome part of the flight was we flew directly over the Alps and it was beautiful.

Then finally we landed in Milan Thursday morning! Yay!!!! I went through passport control, where the worker took my passport without a word, stamped it, and handed it back. Man, that was easy. I then met up with Zach and Megan by baggage claim and we proceeded to start our journey.

From Milan we hopped on the train to go a couple hours to Lake Como, with a train switch in Saronno. Italy has a decent train system, but depending on the trains, not everything is advertised well, so it took a little bit to figure out which train we were suppose to be on in Milan and what stop we were at. However, we ended up at Lake Como without getting lost, so that was a win! :)

Waiting for our train.

Right outside the train station in Saronno

Once in Lake Como, we walked from the train station to the AirBnB that we were staying at. Here are some sights along the hike.

Zach and Megan were exhausted and decided to take a nap while we waited for Nathan (his plane didn't get in until late afternoon, so he was taking a later train by himself). Nathan had told me not to take any naps to combat jet lag, so instead I decided to relax by reading. I thought it was only fitting that basically the first thing I did when I arrived in Italy was spent a couple hours reading. That is so me! It was also great though because our AirBnB had double door windows in the living room that opened up, so I sat there with the beautiful Italian view right in front of me.

It was such a beautiful day!

Once the others woke up, we decided to do a little exploring while waiting for Nathan and came across this garden.

Awwwwww!!!!

Everywhere I go....more flower pictures. :)

We didn't stay out that long because we didn't want to keep Nathan waiting. Turns out his train was getting in later than we thought, so we passed the time watching an episode of The Mentalist. After Nathan arrived, we did some more exploring of Lake Como and got some pizza and gelato to eat. Of course!