The Journal – 6/19 – Layover in Milan/Bergamo

Well, it seems as though Blake and I can’t catch a break with these rough flights! I just about peed my pants when we were about to land. We were flying over the Alps down into Bergamo, and I believe we had to fly through a storm. OH MY GOD!!! The plane started shaking really bad. Mark my words…this was the second worst flight I’ve ever been on. (The worst flight I have ever been on was an Air Asia flight to Bali, when people were screaming out of nervousness.) The shaking only lasted probably 5 minutes max, but that’s a long time for every muscle in your butt to be clenched while your heart is beating a million beats a minute!!!

It’s funny…I always second guess myself about how bad these flights have actually been lately. Sometimes I think I’m just starting to get a flying phobia of some kind, but this one must have been bad because the whole cabin started clapping when we landed. I’m glad that we only have a few more flights to go on.

Once Blake and I grabbed our bags, we thought about going into Bergamo for a few hours. We were only a 20 minute bus ride from the city center, but when we asked the tourist office whether or not anything would be open at 2pm, they said “Probably not.” I guess during Italy’s siesta hours, even restaurants close down. Blake and I even started thinking about going to a shopping center right across the street from the mall, but we ran into problems when we started talking about our luggage. Not real problems…just small ones. I didn’t want to carry my backpacking backpack to the mall because it was too heavy. I thought it would be better to just leave it a the left luggage counter. It did cost 8 euros per bag, but I thought was worth it. Blake didn’t mind carrying his huge bag, especially since we had one of those luggage carts to wheel it around on. The baggage carts, mind you, look like shopping carts, and he was proposing to just wheel it over to the mall. Now, when I say the mall was across the street, it isn’t that simple. As soon as you exit the airport, you make a left and follow the street until it goes into a tunnel. The tunnel allows a pedestrian and other cars to go under the huge highway that we had to eventually get to the other side of. We didn’t know if there was a sidewalk or not, and Blake thought it wouldn’t be a big deal to just take the luggage cart (with his bags in toe,) out of the airport, through the tunnel, and into the mall. I, on the other hand, didn’t want that thing with us. In the midst of our debate, it started pouring down rain, which solved our problem. We ended up just spending the four hours at the Bergamo airport.

Blake and I got some lunch, (a Panini for me and some microwaveable pasta for Blake.) We read and slept a bit, and our flight to Madrid was eventually delayed by a half hour due to weather. After a long and boring time at the airport, we boarded the flight and had a fairly smooth ride into Madrid.

Tags: airport, Bergamo, horrible flights, luggage carts, madrid, Milan