| A sample of the gorgeous lakefront hotels to be found dotting Lake Como's shores |
| Erin's Lake Como Journals 6-22-02, Part 1 I woke up from a pretty restful sleep of almost 5 hours just as we were pulling into Paris. Glenn hadn't done the smart thing and stretched out to sleep, so he only got about 2 hours during the night. I was glad I had - I'm always so grouchy after a short sleep like that! We walked into the station at Montparnasse and quickly found our way down to the Metro, as we had to change stations for our next connection to Milan. Luckily, there were directions of which subway lines to use to get where we needed to go (Pare de Lyon), so we easily got there early and made our way to the station shops to buy breakfast and something for lunch. Our train would leave at 8am, and arrive in Milan at almost 3pm, so we knew we'd be starved without some snacks! We found some sandwiches to pack and had a couple of pastries as we waited for our platform to be assigned. We made it onto our train with no problems. The only bad thing was that we'd been booked into a smoking car (they said all the n/s were full), so we had some unpleasant fumes from time to time. But otherwise, it was pretty productive for me, as I caught up with a couple of weeks of journals that I was behind before the battery on the PDA wore out. After that, it was book reading and admiring the view of the lovely southern French and Alpine countryside until we arrived in Milan. Milan was hot, muggy and crowded. The plan was to find the next train to Como where we'd meet up with Dario and Paola (remember, from Rome?). They had so graciously invited us to come stay with them for a few days before our journey home, and we had been looking forward to being with them for almost two months now. We looked up the train schedules and found one leaving at 3:26pm, arriving in Como at 4. We noticed that the partenza (departures) board listed that train as being 20 minutes late, which put our arrival back to about 4:20. We quickly bought a phone card and gave Dario & Paola a call to let them know when we'd get to the Como station, and they promised to meet us there. Then I called my mom to congratulate her on retirement, which she'd just commenced the day before! It had been a while since we spoke over the phone (since Greece, actually!), so it was great to talk to her. As we waited for the train to be assigned a platform, the numbers rolled back to reveal the train to Como was now an hour late! We called Dario again to let them know of the further delay, then waited with the rest of the crowd. Finally the train pulled into the Milano station, and we quickly boarded, figuring we didn't know when they'd leave, but it should be soon since they were already late. Wrong again. They'd turned off the air conditioning in the train, and it quickly became a sauna in there (temps were already in the 90's outside the train!!!). We waited in steaming stickyness for an additional 30 minutes before we finally took off for Como. (cont.) |
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