Traveling to Zurich and Milan

I decided to do a travel journal for our European vacation so that I would be able to remember everything that happened and for people to partake in our adventure.  I'll try to a day by day blog post for each day. So here is day 1 which begins September 23, 2012.

We left our house in Northwest Arkansas to catch our flight before the sun even came up.  Our friends Greg and Becky picked us up at 5:30 in the morning to take us to the airport.  We left our regional airport at 7:00 and so began our vacation.  We landed in Dallas with plenty of time to catch our next flight to JFK.  Once we got to New York we had 4 hours to eat lunch and relax before our flight to Zurich.  We went to our gate and our plane was already at the gate.  We then found an Irish Pub to eat lunch at, which the food was absolutely disgusting!  After lunch we headed back over to our gate and watched them load the plane and charged our phones.  When it came time to board the plane they made an announcement saying there was a gate change, which was half way around the airport!  After walking all the way around the airport to our new gate we found out that our flight was delayed.  We finally left New York after our flight was delayed for an hour and a half.  We later found out that the plane we were supposed to get on had technical problems. This meant we only had 30 minutes to make it to our train in Zurich!!

Waiting for our flight to leave from XNA.

Self portrait from the plane.

Views from the airplane.

 When we landed in Zurich it was raining and we barely had enough time to grab our bags and make it through immigration.  We ran through the subway station to find the commuter train to take us to the train station.  We boarded the train with just a few minutes to spare before it left for Milan.  Unfortunately we didn’t know where first class was and we sat in second class.   We discovered many things about the trains after this, you can do WHATEVER you want to do on the train and sitting second class is awful!!! After this train we never rode in second class again!  So if you plan on taking the trains in Europe it’s well worth paying extra to sit in first class.

Pictures taken from the train.  I didn't take many because I got a little motion sick so I had to go to sleep.

Once we got into Milan we left the train station and tried to find our hotel.  We meet a really nice Italian man who told us that our hotel was just right outside the train station.  We couldn’t find it and it didn’t help that it was raining.  So we found a taxi driver and asked him if he knew where Hotel Atlantic was?  He said that he did but it was just easier for us to walk to it.  Thankfully he pointed out where our hotel was and it was within a 2 minute walk.  After we checked in we went to our room and we found out that it was one of the executive rooms with a private balcony.  We freshened up and asked the hotel manager how to find the shopping district.  There are several shopping districts in Milan so we headed to the closest one to us.  We found out that Fashion Week was going on in Milan.  We got to see a couple of photo shots and film shots going on in the city.  We picked a local pizza place for dinner and had the best gelato we had during our entire trip!

Our room was very nice!!

Walking around Milan.

Photo shot for Fashion Week.

First pizza in Italy!

Best gelato!!!!!