By the time you read this, it will be the 8th of
July. I will have already been experiencing the 8th of July for
longer than you have, unless you are reading this in Europe, because that’s
where I am. At least, I hope I am. I’d better not still be in Portland at the
airport!
You see, our family is on an amazing vacation to Italy,
Austria, and Germany right now (hopefully), but I am writing this before we
left. I was very skeptical of my ability to complete this column while on
vacation with my family, since I’ll be traveling with my wife, my
mother-in-law, and all three of our boys. I’m not even sure what I was thinking
when I signed on for this trip, actually, but I have to assume I will be
splitting my time between telling my children not to touch the five
hundred-year-old piece of artwork and telling them to go to the bar and order
me another Peroni. A bigger one this time.
Also, I’m not sure if Europe has the internet or Wi-Fi yet,
so I wanted to be safe.
So, in lieu of three weeks of reruns or nothing at all, I
thought I would write our European vacation travel log ahead of time. I have
traveled extensively with my wife and her mom, and I have lived and traveled
with our three boys all of their lives, so I am already pretty sure how things
are going to go.
Psychic Travel Log, Volume I – Milan
We started our trip at the Sacramento International Airport.
Like many things in Sacramento, it’s a smaller, duller, less awesome version of
a regular city’s airport. It recently got the “international” status by finally
offering a flight to Canada. Actually, it’s really a flight into Seattle with
an optional bus ride to the border, but apparently that counts.
When we checked in, the gate agent said, “You’re going to
Milan?”
“Yep.”
“From here?” she asked, with a puzzled look on her face.
“Yep.”
“Wow. Neat. And you’re flying with the kids?” she asked,
watching Son Number Three climb into one of the giant potted plants by the end
of the counter.
“Yep.”
“Good luck with that, sir.”
Five minutes into the flight from Sacramento to Portland,
Oregon we realized that is was a colossal mistake to bring three children on an
airplane with only three adults to chaperone them. The first flight was only an
hour and a half, but we were already exhausted from playing man-to-man defense
with no subs. What were we thinking? We sat stunned in the Portland airport
dreading the next flight from Portland to Frankfurt. The flight would be
approximately two hundred hours long. There was no way we could do that with the
kids. We searched frantically near the shops and restaurants for someone to buy
our children. No takers.
Reluctantly, we all boarded the aircraft. We gave up trying
to control the children somewhere over Newfoundland. When we landed in
Frankfurt, there was a tense fifteen-minute period when we could not find Son
Number Three, but eventually one of the flight attendants located him in an
overhead storage compartment in the galley. We were asked never to fly
Lufthansa again.
The local time in Germany was listed as 2:00 P.M. on July 8th,
but it was really 3:52 A.M. on the 12th of August on our bodies. Completely
numb at this point, the short flight from Frankfurt to Milan was a breeze. That
was largely due to the fact that we put the kids on a later connecting flight.
Most of them made it into Milan on time.
While in Europe, we were not staying in any hotels - only
Airbnb apartment and house rentals. This is because European hotels are
designed to hold and average of 0.5 guests per room at a cost of approximately
nine thousand euros for each half guest, with a surcharge of two million euros
for every half guest after one and a half.
Safely at our final destination, we set about figuring out
how to get ourselves and our considerable amount of luggage to our first
apartment rental in downtown Milan.
Why are all the signs in a foreign language?
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2015 Marc Schmatjen
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