The Long Trip Home to California

Tuesday, 3 July, 2018

Apologies to Paul Sabolic and Mike D'Antuono for this post coming five days after the fact. We have had wifi issues at Casa Contreras.

Tuesday was a long day for us as we made our way home from Venegono Superiore to Camarillo.

We were up by 6:00 a.m. and ready to go by 7:00 a.m. but our ride to Milan's Malpensa Airport was not going to arrive until 9:15 a.m.

Only one thing to do . . . MANGIA!

The only problem was that we were out of food at the Villa Skorpion.

The simple solution was to drive down to the Venegono Inferiore train station and get some sustenance at Le Due Isole.

Papa Francesco

Papa Francesco and his wife Laura are the owners of Le De Isole and their lovely daughter Jada hangs out there after school as well.

This friendly, outgoing family has been very kind to us over the last five and a half months and today was no different.

Besides serving us our usual cappuccini and brioches they had a parting gift for our long trip home.

They had specially prepared four calzones for us to enjoy on our journey home. Knowing our individual tastes, two of them were spicy (me) and two were mild (Laurie).

Truly good people.

GRAZIE PAPA FRANCESCO,

LAURA and JADA!

Pietro Caprioli

Pietro was our ride to Malpensa and arrived right on schedule to whisk us away.

This portion of the trip was easy as traffic was not an issue.

GRAZIE PIETRO!

Once at Malpensa, check in was a breeze as was going through security.

Too easy . . .

Once pass security we were enticed

to buy a few final souvenirs

A tough choice but the answer was a firm NO!

It killed me but again, NO!

We even passed on a last gelato

What were the odds of that?

The first of our two flights today was a . . .

. . . 95 minute Vueling Air

flight to Barcelona

It took off right on time at 12:20 p.m.

Vueling Air is definitely

NOT noted for their leg room

Once in Barcelona, we had a four hour layover before our final flight to Los Angeles.

The FC Barcelona store in the airport

was tempting but again NO!

One thing about Barcelona's El Prat Airport, they sell tapas.

si, Si, SI!

One can not live on calzones alone as it turns out.

Incredibly, I did share this tray with Laurie.

Norwegian Air's 12 hour and 20 minute

flight to LAX was also on time

For us, this was a HUGE upset as our three previous flights on Norwegian Air had been an hour and a half, two hours and a half and four hours and 20 minutes late in taking off.

Too easy . . .

Again, little leg room

Suck it up big boy, it's only for 12 hours and 20 minutes.

It was a smooth flight and thankfully the seats were wide.

Perhaps it was the 7 kilos/15.5 pounds of weight that I lost in Italy that made the seat feel wider.

We were back in the USA!

Thankfully no huge photo of

President Trump to ruin our mood

We LOVE L.A.!

I knew that things had gone along too easily.

When we checked in our two pieces of luggage with Vueling Air in Italy, we were told that they would be transferred for us to our Norwegian Air flight departing from Barcelona.

We had a four hour layover as I stated earlier so this transfer should have been easy enough.

Wrong.

At LAX our bags were missing. We filled out the appropriate paperwork and were assured by the kind, patient people at Norwegian Air that they would track them down and notify us when they got to LAX.

Our son Michael picked us up at LAX and quickly got us home in under an hour as there was little traffic by Los Angeles standards at 11:00 p.m.

GRAZIE MICHAEL!

Our trip home turned a little more sour once home as our wifi was not working and both of our cars had dead batteries.

Nothing insurmountable but irritating.

It was still good to be home.

Reading Is FUNdamental

Finished this one on the

plane flight to LAX

This was another good, action packed read that I highly recommend.