Day 1 – Fly to Italy

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Up at 2.45 am – that’s even early for me! A short taxi ride to Terminal 2 to get us there for the obligatory 2 hour ‘prior to departure’ check-in. On arrival at the Italia desks we find the check-in desks closed! Queues, queues and more queues!

Once through check-in, we head for Security/Departure Gate. It’s also closed and queuing passengers with more than one piece of hand-luggage are being forced to leave the queue. Why they couldn’t do this earlier in the check-in process, I can’t say, but it made the queue a little shorter. 🙂

Shoes off, coats off, laptops out of bags, mobiles and keys on-show – the recent security rules seem to be biting although some of the hand luggage was clearly larger than the permitted dimensions!

It’ll be a miracle if the plane takes off at 6 – and as one passing American commented: “..it’s the way they [the Italians] run the country”.

We landed at Malpensa on time, but after some more queuing, we finally arrived the gate to find that the next leg of the flight was delayed by three hours. Ah well, an opportunity to wander round the shops at the airport and squander our free food vouchers!

Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, we had a strange feeling when we went to retrieve our luggage…

You know what’s coming…

..and it wasn’t our luggage! The baggage handlers in Milan managed to lose (or misplace) all three suitcases. So, we’re boarding the ship with nothing at all. We’re told there’s another flight out of Milan and there’s a small chance the luggage will be on it.

Time to try out the free alcohol on board and enjoy the views of Venice as we start our holiday…

More news tomorrow…