May 31, 2016

It is Tuesday 31 and we are on the train to Milano for about 3 hours, then a 3+ hour excursion to Bergamo and back to Milano to see two 1001 paintings and then on to Zurich, arriving at 22:28.  It will be a long day.  Originally we were going to stay overnight in Milano and that is how I bought the train tickets in advance to get the best prices.  But it turns out there is an opening ceremony for the Gothard Tunnel so the train I wanted to buy never became available for the day we needed it.  So instead of staying in Milano we have to get to Zurich tonight.  This does give us almost an entire day in Zurich and we do have one painting to see.

Monday we went to the Vittorio Emanuele Monument to climb to the top for the view.  You can see from the photos that the views are neat.  We didn’t have to climb all the way to the top, they have a glass enclosed elevator for the last half of the trip.  That was about it for the day, later we went to the grocery to get supplies for the train.  I have to say that the Italians don’t know how to do junk food.  Their cookies are made for dunking in coffee, so for me they are not good for just eating.  The candy selection is also weak.  They do have M&Ms, but they are very expensive (I had a medium size bag earlier in the week for about €3.50.  There are no Skittles, they just don’t have any good stuff.  But I did get a couple of bags of caramel candy and Sue got some fruit gummies.  She also made a couple of salami sandwiches, so we won’t starve.  There is a café car on the train if we manage to eat through all the snacks.

Sue got everything packed up and ready to go last night.  We had breakfast and only one cup of coffee, so you can understand the hardships we are dealing with.  Our train from Rome left on time and we actually arrived in Milano a minute or two early.  We found the train for Bergamo and hopped on.  The ride was about one hour.  We stored our luggage and eventually found the bus to the Pinacoteca of the Accademia Carrara.  It is a very nice gallery.  We saw the two 1001 paintings #584 and 585, and I got carried away taking photos of other paintings by artists on our list.  Sue had to remind me that we wanted to catch the early bus back to the train station.  It started to sprinkle as we walked back to the bus stop.  We had to wait about 10 minutes for our bus.  It really started to rain on the bus ride back, it even hailed along with the rain.  We had to run across the road to the station in the rain to get our luggage from the storage lockers.  Fortunately they were under a roof.  Even though we had our umbrellas we got pretty wet walking to the rail station.  We had about 15 minutes before our train left, but when we got into the station the board that shows the trains and their platforms was down.  So we had to scramble to find out which platform our train was at, but we did.  The ride back to Milano was uneventful.  We went to McDonalds and Sue was able to get a delicious coffee Americano.  That made her day.  Right now we are on the train to Zuerich (Italian spelling).  We just went through a slow section so we may not make the scheduled 10:25 arrival.  We still have 3.5 hours to go. 

UPDATE: there are rail strikes in France, who woulda thunk it?  So we’ll have to find out later today (9:00 June 1^st now) if out trains today and tomorrow are running.  I don’t know how to put in a sad imoji.

 

Bergamo May 31 2016 

Bergamo May 31 2016