Today is a travel day.
We had an early breakfast to finish off the leftover pizza from last night, then headed out for a morning walk before the crowds and the heat arrived.
A quick walk over the Ponte Vecchio one last time—spectacular without the crowds. You can actually move and see the details of the bridge.
We then headed back toward the Duomo for one last look without the sea of people. It’s a truly amazing building.
Here we continued our trip-long ritual of calling home to talk to family on Sunday night before dinner. It’s hard to believe that next Sunday we’ll be back around the table with them all. It will be good to be home—as much as we have been loving the trip, our bodies are getting tired.
After our morning walk—a warm-up for the pack-carrying ahead—we returned to our apartment, packed our bags, and hauled our packs down to Florence station.
We had a 2-hour train ride from Florence to Milan.
We arrived at Milan Centrale—where our European journey started almost four weeks ago.
It was lunchtime, and we discovered Milan Centrale has a Mercato Centrale, so we headed there for a bite to eat.
The kids are almost over pasta, pizza, and the associated derivatives. They wanted burgers. We found a burger place and ordered. Laura and I shared a salmon poke bowl and a few beers (it was bloody hot).
After lunch, we needed to catch a tram to our apartment—the number 10. We waited outside for about 25 minutes before an old rattler arrived. This was ours. On we got.
After about 30 minutes, we arrived at our stop. Music filled the air. There was a music festival (Party Like a Dee Jay) happening right on the doorstep of the apartment.
After we checked in, we decided eating in would be good tonight. We headed around the block to the local mini-supermarket—checking out the festival on the way.
We loaded up with groceries and grabbed a few beers and a bottle of wine—the plan was to sit out on our patio, enjoy dinner and a few drinks while listening to the festival music.
“Sorry sir, no alcohol today,” said the guy at the checkout.
“Sorry? What?” I replied. “We are living just around the corner.”
“No sir. The festival. No alcohol from any shop today,” he responded.
Ok… that puts a spanner in the works. We unloaded our basket—keeping the bare essentially—and checked out and headed home. Looks like we’re eating out tonight.
I searched for the next nearest supermarket. There was one a few blocks over. I headed out and was able to buy a bottle of wine and a few beers there and walk back to the apartment. Evening saved.
We rapidly chilled the bottle of wine and chilled out on the patio for an hour before heading out for dinner.
Again, the kids were not keen for more pizza and pasta. This limited our options a little. We eventually settled on a Mexican place around the corner—this seemed to satisfy the tastebuds for today.
On the way home, the daily gelato. Earlier, we had seen massive lines at a place just up the street. As we walked home, there was almost no queue, so we thought we would give it a shot. Possibly the worst gelato of the trip so far. Not sure what the big queues were about.
Luckily, our family trip policy is to not have gelato from the same place twice—regardless of how good it is.
Tomorrow we have tickets to the San Siro Stadium. We plan to head out early and do that in the morning before exploring more of Milan later.
