The Eagle Has Landed

I am on the ground in Riccione, Italy. The flights were uneventful, but long. I left at 10:15am on Thursday and arrived in Milan at 8:30am Friday. Everything ran on time.

The plan was that I left about 6 hours from the time the plane landed until I needed to board the train for the 3 1/2 ride to Riccione. That was before I met Christina from Vienna on the bus leaving the airport. She was taking a 3-day weekend in Milan as a quick getaway from her work as an SAP HR consultant. She had taken a year off from work to travel the world a year earlier, so this was just a quick travel fix for her. The airline had delayed her bags, so we ended up storing mine, including my bike, at the train station and set out on a 4-5 hour walk around Milan. We saw the Duomo in the center of town and the buiding where Michelangelo's "Last Supper" is housed. It turns out the Christmas day and May 1 are the only days that you are not allowed to climb to the roof of the Duomo.

We stoped for a coffee (which seems to be an Italian "must" that I am going to be missing). I substitued a dark hot chocolate that had to be at least as good as any coffee. Later we stopped for some bruchetta and a glass of wine. House wine was one of the few great deals, about 2 euros per glass (~$2.60). We covered a pretty large section of town by foot, which caused me to miss my scheudled train. Here was the first case where my no-reservation, no-firm-plan approach to travel paid a dividend. We said goodbye and I caught the next train without any fees for a broken reservation.

Arrived in Riccione and checked into the Hotel Adlon. My laptop managed to take out the power on the 5th floor twice in the first 15 minutes of my stay. I don't know what happened, but the laptop seems to have survived it. I got a visit from the manager of the hotel asking me not to use it any more until they figured out what was going on. I am currently operating on battery.

A started assembling my bike at about 9:00 and went to dinner at 10:30. The bike went together pretty well, with a couple of little glitches. I need a third hand to relieve the front derailleur tension in order to reconect that cable, and my wheels my have gone slightly out of true as a result of the tight packing. I may need to make some minor brake adjustments before riding tomorrow. Both will be solvable.

I went out for my first dinner in Italy, and not surprisingly, it was great. The menu was in Italian, the waiter spoke Italian and a little German, but no English. We faked our way through and I ended up with a seafood antipasta sampler and a second course of tortellini with seafood. I didn't recognize everything on the plate when it showed up, in fact, I'm not completely sure I know anything that was on the anitpasta plate. Although the "tortilini" certainly looked like what I think is linguini, I had no complaints. The waiter finished off by bringing over an unordered cask of (I think) homemade liquer. It looked like kahlua, but it smelled and tasted like Sambuca. At any rate, it was very good and didn't show up on my bill.

Finished dinner at midnight, and I'm ready for some jet-lag catch-up sleep. I will probably go for a short easy ride tomorrow to shake off the cobwebs, then get more ambitious on Sunday. I change hotels to Hotel Dory in Riccione tomorrow.

Another opportunity to take out a hotel electrical system.