Sunday/Monday, September 10/11, 1999

Our trip to Europe started, as most trips do, with the long, boring plane trip. First, we fly for over three hours from Seattle to Dallas. I think of this as "starter" flight since it—or a similar flight to Chicago—precedes all trips on American Airlines eastward. We’d gotten up at 4AM to catch the plane, so mostly, we entertained ourselves of this flight by sleeping.

At Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, we were treated to their traditional long procession from the landing field to the terminal. New travelers are often amazed by how long it takes once you’ve landed at this airport to even get within sight of the actual terminal. You actually get to ride the jet on a bridge over the freeway. It’s very exciting. I often think that they call it the Dallas - Fort Worth airport because they land in Fort Worth and then taxi to Dallas to let you off.

At Dallas, we switched planes to get to London. Since American Airline occupies something like a hundred gates at three different terminals, you can walk forever to catch your flight or you can take what they now call the TRAAIN. The two AA’s in the middle stand for American Airlines. The TRAAIN is a automatic, self-guided electric tram that shuttles between the various gates. They used to call it the TRAAM but since they remodeled and expanded the American Airlines terminals, they upgraded the name. We used the TRAAM or TRAAIN or whatever, suffering through the usually confusion about where to get off. They always leave you about an hour and a half at Dallas-Fort Worth to switch planes because everything there takes so much time. It’s always such a relief when you finally get to your get gate that so you don’t worry about the fact that they’ve probably delayed your flight. At least you can rest up for the flight.

We left Dallas in the evening heading east. We wouldn’t get to London until early the next morning. During the eight-hour flight, they feed you about two and half meals and show about four hours of stuff on the big screen, but during this type of flight, you really want to get as much sleep as possible. Since we were flying business class, they also gave us little video players to watch another movie of our choice in addition to the movie on the shared screen. Rebecca got a Clint Eastwood movie, True Crime. After one of the meals on the eight-hour flight, Rebecca fell asleep watching her movie. The attendant came by and with a nod to me, took her video player. I wasn’t awake enough myself to decide whether this was a good idea or not. When Rebecca awoke about an hour later, I discovered that it wasn’t.

"Where’s my movie," Rebecca asked after searching around her seat. "I want to see the end."

She was a little disappointed in me for not putting up a fight for it, so I volunteered to go up and get it back. The flight attendant was very apologetic. He explained that, when people went to sleep on this flight, they were usually out for the count.

When Rebecca got her video player back, she forced herself to watch the whole movie. She really would rather have slept the flight away. But, after making an issue of getting her player back, she was committed. She kept her eyes open for the principle of the thing.

Eight hours later we landed at London’s Gatwick airport, another very entertaining facility. As in most European airports, you don’t get off the plane and actually walk into the terminal. You get off the plane and get into a bus. You wait for the bus to fill, then the bus drives you to the terminal. Then you get to walk. You get to walk a lot.

Groggy from flight, we walked and walked through the rounded corridors that seem to connect endlessly to one another. Then we came to a window. We looked back to see the round tubes connected to round towers through which we had been walking. The design looks exactly like a Habit-trail. Habit-trails are these clear plastic tubes and round towers that you connect to create trails for your hamster. If you want to know what your hamster feels like crawling around in them, visit London’s Gatwick. I often imagine Gatwick’s designers are watching the passengers move through these tubes from the airport tower, pointing at us and cooing to each other, "Aren’t they cute?"

At the end of the walk, they had promised us a "transfer lounge." Since we were not getting off in London, but connecting to a flight to Milan, we are not going get out of the airline system. Instead, they keep us in the system of long corridors, lounges and buses. We are trapped in it like some particularly hard to digest food in a very long intestinal track. The "lounge" is a big room with about six seats and six hundred people, none of them are lounging. What it really is a bus stop within the airport terminal itself.

The importance of the autobus in the European airline system usually surprises the less cosmopolitan American tourist. Not only do busses take you from the plane to the terminal and from the terminal to the plane, but also buses are used to take you between different terminals. In our case, we are moving from the South Terminal, where American airlines is, to the North Terminal where British Air, that we are flying to Milan, is. This requires a wait for the bus. The fifteen-minute wait allows a crowd to build. When the bus finally arrives, it’s both a rush and, after everyone loads, a bit of a crush.

Our bus ride from one terminal to another was more interesting than the one from the first bus ride to the terminal. During that first bus ride, we just wound around some other planes until we got to the terminal door. In this case, however, we got an external tour of the airport itself. This is of interest for two reasons. First, the airport is extremely ugly, with big blank walls and lots of corrugated metal looking like a particularly dismal warehouse district, a place for big vehicles and machines. Secondly, we got to wind around all types of anti-tank and anti-bomb barriers. They designed these barriers to prevent the random, suicidal IRA or Palestinian terrorist from driving a truck full of explosives into the airport. They are massive, concrete walls that lean outward and are about ten feet high. They painted these barriers in stripes of bright orange and green and festooned with barbwire. They don’t say "anti-terrorist devices" on them, but I can’t imagine what else they might be. They are the only interesting architectural feature to the colorless, blank walls of Gatwick.

I’ve always been curious about how these barriers are supposed to work since the buses between terminals always seem to find their way around them from one terminal to another. They don’t seem to form a continuous barrier, but I am sure this is just an illusion. The route that the buses have to take is so long, twisted and convoluted that I am sure that the terrorist would rather run into these barriers rather than do all this stupid winding around.

Finally, we got to the other terminal and we got to walk through some more blank, rounded corridors. This time the goal at end is a check-in "lounge," somewhere ahead. By now, we didn’t really expect any type of lounging. We expected to walk. What is so strange about these convoluted paths though Gatwick is that, unlike most long-winding paths, you don’t seem to have any alternatives about where to go. It wasn’t like we were passing lots of other gates or lounges. There seemed to be only one way in at the bus stop and one end somewhere far ahead in these long walks. It is a complete mystery what all these miles of corridor are for.

Then came the shock. We never got to the promised check-in lounge. The crowd of people in front of us stopped in a traffic jam. We couldn’t even see the promised check-in lounge in front of us. All we could see were the heads of several hundred people waiting to get into it. We were a little concerned because, after all our walking and lounging, we only had about forty minutes until our flight. Then we noticed a few dozen people breaking off the light, through some ropes, to the right. We followed them. There was a British Air counter before the real check-in lounge somewhere ahead. We were flying on British Air on the next link in our trip. We got out of the line and just walked up to an empty counter, checked into our flight, and were politely directed to our gate. Meanwhile, the huge crowd of waiting people behind us grew and grew. We never did learn what the problem was in the check-in lounge. We went off in the other direction to the "wait-for-your gate" lounge.

Of course, it was quite a walk to the next lounge. We had to wait at another lounge because they couldn’t tell us what gate our plane was going be at until it was actually time to board. On this last walk, we walked by dozens of empty gates, but, of course, it would have been too easy to pull the planes up to them.

After we finally got to the "wait for gate" lounge, we had to wait another half hour to get our gate number. This time the waiting lounge for business class was very nice with refreshments and snacks and comfy chairs. Rebecca had a little adventure in the restroom.. She turned on the water and it comes out scalding hot. She almost burns herself. She looks up and sees a sign. It says: "Scalding hot water." This is certainly truth in advertising. She asks me why when she comes back. "For making tea?" I guess. This is London, after all.

Finally, we got a gate number and also got to walk so more. After another nice hike, we arrived at the gate. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was actually a jet, sitting at the end of a boarding ramp, right off the gate, just like in the states. I had thought that we’d have at least one more bus ride before we got to our plane. We give them our boarding pass. We walked out the door, down the ramp, but before we came to the plane, there was a rope blocking it off. The attendants motioned us down some stairs. We went out on the tarmac. Surprise: they have a bus waiting. The plane at the gate was a clever ruse. They drove the bus out on the tarmac winding around several other planes to a smaller jet that was our actual flight.

On the flight to Milan, we enjoyed our third omelet of the trip. We had one the morning we took off in Seattle and another before we landed in London. Now we got a third taking off from London. Every omelet was very different. This one was dark and nasty looking but it was the first that actually tasted good. Rebecca didn’t try it. She’d had enough of airplane omelets and this one had its looks against it.

At Milan, the jet unloaded us into another bus. We could only comment again about the importance of buses in European air travel. The bus took us to a small terminal. We waited for our luggage. We waited some more. Our entire flight stood around us. We were looking at each other and our watches. It was about lunchtime. Do baggage handlers take a lunch break in Italy? We began to wonder if they loaded our luggage on another flight in London. Maybe it missed one of the many buses required for European air travel.

Finally, some luggage from our flight showed up, but not our bags. This was looking serious. We thought we were real clever packing our bags. We divided our clothes between the two bags that we’d checked. If one was lost, both Rebecca and I would still have enough clothes for several days. Of course, this would require the airlines to lose both of our bags. This had never happened to us before, but it certainly wasn’t beyond their abilities. We might have been cleverer to put at least one change of clothes in our carry-on bags in case nothing arrived.

Then, when we’d about given up hope , our bags showed up on the belt. It had been forty-five minutes waiting for them, but seeing them makes us so happy that we forget the wait. On a long trip, the little thing like getting your luggage are so much fun.

We caught a taxi at the airport for our hotel in Milan, the Grand Hotel Brun. We were running late. The plane was late because of the delays out of London. Then we had the wait for our luggage. We would have told the taxi-driver to hurry, but since he almost ran over a couple of people in the airport crosswalk as soon as we get in the cab, we figured that he didn’t need much encouragement.

This is Rebecca’s first experience with Italian traffic. I had the opportunity to drive a car here more than twenty-years ago and it seemed to me that it’s gotten a lot more sedate. Sure, riding on the Italian freeway is still a test of courage. Nevertheless, not as much as I had remembered. It seems that the Italians have lost some of their faith in an afterlife or perhaps they are not as sure that they were going to their reward. When I was here before, it was clear that death held no terror for them. Now, perhaps life was a little better and paradise less certain.

Rebecca thought the traffic looked scary. I remembered that I had just read recently that Italians have the highest rate of traffic fatalities in Western Europe. She didn’t thank me for sharing. Instead, she asked me not to tell her mother. She also checked the time to make sure the Dramamine from the flight hadn’t worn off.

I noticed something interesting about the freeway lanes. They started out marked like American roads, into three or four separate lanes. However, after awhile, those separate, marked lanes went away. There was one, marked lane at the right for trucks, but the rest of the freeway was one, big, wide lane which was kind of a free-for-all area for the rest of the traffic. This seemed so practical since I remembered that the Italians had always more or less ignored the lane markers.

Strangely, the right-hand truck lane is too narrow for the trucks themselves. They all drive with their left-hand wheels in the free-for-all area. The left-hand side of the free-for-all area is dominated by high-powered German cars that accelerate madly toward the cars in front of them as if trying to scare them into getting out of the way. When these cars don’t scare to the right, the heavy Mercedes get to brake hard. All through the traffic, motor cycles and small motor scooters flood into every opening, buzzing around the traffic like a hoard of hurried insects.

In this crowd, our taxi-driver seemed relatively sedate. He kept in the middle of the crowd, avoiding trucks overhanging the right hand lane and the Mercedes gobbling up the left. Still, Rebecca kept grabbing me every time he jammed on the brakes. I figured that it took about fifty grabs to get us from the airport to the hotel.

At the Grand Hotel Brun, we discovered that the front desk doesn’t have any keys for our room. He thinks that we have already checked in. Rebecca suggested that Mom and Michele may have picked them up since they came in earlier in the day. The man at the front desk quickly agreed that that must have been what happened. We hoped that they are still around. With the delays getting out of London and the wait for our luggage, we were about two hours later than we’d told them that we would get in. However, a quick call discovered them in their room. They had our keys. Our room was right next to theirs. We went up to meet them.

We were pleasantly surprised to find out that our room was very nice, spacious by European standards, modern, with marble floors in the bathroom. The first thing we wanted to do after traveling for the last twenty hours was take a shower. This introduced us to the only obvious oddity in the room: the shower in the bathtub. The showerhead came straight down from the ceiling. It hung over the middle of the tub like some tiny chandelier. It worked fine, though. It had good water pressure and hot water. Both have been in short supply on other trips to Europe.

The tub was very slippery. Cleverly, there was a cord hanging down in the tub. It hangs like a drapery pull from a box that says, "Emergency" on it. We guessed that the idea is to pull it if you fall down in the tub and can’t get up. This won’t be much help if the fall knocks you unconscious, of course, but maybe you are suppose to grab it on the way down. We didn’t know what happened if you pull it. Did a siren sound? Did a light go on somewhere that calls up a bellboy? Did it dial 911? A rubber bathmat seemed a simpler solution to a slippery tub, but this was certainly more intriguing.

After some discussion with Mom and Michele, Rebecca and I decided that we’d rather take a nap to recover from the flight rather than go do anything more interesting. We laid down on the queen-size bed—another rarity in European hotels—and fell sound asleep for two hours.

After our nap, at about 6PM, we get our first chance to meet the rest of the tour group that we will be traveling with for the next twelve days. We had expected a bunch of old people in Mom’s age group. We were pleasantly surprised to find a large range of ages. Mom was probably one of the oldest. The youngest was a twenty-something year-old traveling with her much older parents. Many were about Rebecca’s and my age or perhaps a little older.

Mom was surprised that they don’t have nametags or a cocktail party for us. Apparently, most of the tours that she’s been on have a little "let’s get acquainted" party at the beginning. Instead, we simply introduced ourselves to the tour guide, Enzo. Enzo was a gray-looking man of medium height and medium weight. He was middle-aged. We read his bulletin board giving tomorrow’s schedule. After that, everyone sort of milled around and we met a few of our fellow travelers. However, without nametags, cocktails and snacks, it seemed awkward. Mom, Michele, Rebecca and I were beginning to wonder what we were going to for dinner. The tour didn’t include dinners and, apparently, because they closed the restaurants in the area on Monday.

Enzo offered to take everyone on the bus to an area where there were more restaurants. Since we were all new to town, everyone was eager to follow. Driving in Italian traffic in a big bus seems safer and more secure. We were happy to discover that the bus that we would be touring Italy on was new and comfortable. As we left the Hotel Brun, we passed Milan’s huge soccer stadium. It holds 80,000 people and looks like some modern work of art huge corkscrew towers in the corners that act as ramps to take people up to the various levels in the stadium. We also passed the giant, bronze, horse recently donated to the city by a group of Americans. The horse recreates a design by Leonardo DaVinci by which he never built. We just glimpsed a shadow of it driving by. It looked huge and beautiful from its silhouette.

On the way into the city, we turned a corner in the bus and ran into a strange traffic jam. The traffic was a blocked by cars waiting for a parking place at the local grocery store. Cars waiting for a parking place to open were holding up other cars trying to get through the street. The parking places for the supermarket opened up relatively quickly, but the arguments between the people waiting and the people they were holding up went on much longer than the actual wait. The delayed Italian drivers yelled colorful expressions and made interesting gestures from the windows of their cars. Even after the car holding them up was parked out of the way, the delayed cars pulled up next to them to spend more time explaining their displeasure and themselves blocking the traffic. They weren’t in too much hurry to miss out on a good complaint session. We finally got through both the traffic and the discussions and into an area, that had a few restaurants open.

We remembered from our last trip to Milan a great area for restaurants. It was a little alley with about a dozen large restaurants. The area was very popular with locals who filled all this places. We wanted to take Mom and Michele there. We tried to ask the tour guide Enzo about it. He didn’t know what we were talking about. He certainly didn’t want to take us anywhere else.

The bus found a parking place and dropped us off near a large church. The tour guide lead most of the group off toward a nearby cafeteria. Our family stayed behind because Mom wanted to get money from a cash machine. There was one right near where the bus stopped. The presence of cash machine everywhere in Europe has more or less eliminated the need for traveler’s checks. We told Mom not to worry about getting lira before coming to Italy because she could get what she needed day to day as we passed cash machines. Mom and Michele didn’t see any cash machines coming through the airport, but we were glad to be proven correct at this first bus stop.

The ATM let us select instructions in English. Many of the instructions actually did come up in English, telling us to insert our card, type in a number, but then the machine reverts to Italian telling us which keys to press to actually get the money. We figured that the Italian word beginning in "E" was probably "ENTER." It worked. Mom was happy to have more cash.

We didn’t follow the tour group to the cafeteria. Instead, we crossed the street to a small Italian restaurant at the other side of the church. It was a cute little place inside where no one spoke English. This was the type of authentic experience we were after. We had our choice of tables since it was only eight o’clock. This is early for Italians to eat dinner. They usually come out about nine or even later. Fortunately, they had English menus and everything were ordered was delicious. What we didn’t know was what anything cost. The English menus didn’t have prices. Were we getting charge for every breadstick, every glass of water? By the end of our meal, the restaurant was full of local people, so we ere sure that the place doesn’t make their money by stealing from naïve tourists. After consuming a bottle of good house red wine—a tradition we continued for the whole trip—we didn’t much care what we were paying.

The only shock came at the end of the meal. Everyone else was finished, but I wanted some fruit. I ordered a single plate of fruit. The waiter brought us a huge bowl overflowing with peaches, pears, grapes, apples and oranges. He also brought a big bowl of water to wash it in. Mom and Michele we sure they were charging us for the whole bowl and wanted to take it all. I thought we were paying only for a single serving, but that I could choose what I wanted. As it turns out, the fruit was at the perfect point of ripeness. I got a pear that just melted in my mouth. I passed pieces of it around. We then had another. Michele smelled a peach, but we were all full, so we asked for a bill. I don’t know if they charged us for the plate or the whole bowl, but it was only about $2.50 for the fruit so it didn’t matter. The whole mean for the four of us seemed very reasonable.

One they way back, we sat across from the tour guide. As we would for most of the trip. I got the sense that he didn’t like people very much. He was from Rome and didn’t seem to care much for Milan. He also didn’t like it when other people talked when he was trying to talk.