Thursday May29 & Friday May 30

Stress begins the moment you wake up, the morning of your departure to the airport. Like an idiot, I packed like a fiend til 4:00 a.m. I guess you might say I was a 'bit' disorganized. Ironically all I took with me was a ten year old Backpack in 'new' condition as it was only used once before on my last trip to Europe. They don't make them this way anymore with NO metal back support to add more weight. I was perfectly ok with that. " You are ONLY taking that little thing with you?!!" one of my friends asked me in amazement when they saw it. I'll explain later my secret for packing and saving tons of extra baggage hassles.

We arrived at the Airport in plenty of time. But the stress began in earnest with my arrival at 'Checkpoint Charlie'. I 'went off' while walking through that x-ray thingee. A loud beep went off and they directed me to the side. "Take off your shoes", they instructed me. I had to sit down and wait for a female TSA (Homeland Security--don't ask me what TSA means) attendant to check me out with her wand. While that was going on, Luigi went through all the bags with another attendant who decided to check out my little 'cosmetic bag'. Luigi called over to me that they had taken my tiny, little manicure scissors away. What the Hell! My nail clipper can take a bigger chunk out of someone than that microscopic pair of scissors, and they didn't take the clippers away! I also found out that my cork soled shoes had metal plates in them.

We settled into our seats on Continental Airlines flight to Newark. The Flight plan was the best we could get at the time we went to get tickets on Orbitz.com. They put us in the very last row of a 737. After we took off, I started checking out who was sitting next to me. He looked like a man from the Middle East. "Could he be from Saudi Arabia?", I asked myself. Thinking I was getting a little paranoid and possibly committing a racist profile faux pas in my mind, I told myself to cease and desist. They came by with drinks and I was occupying myself with reading. At one point I looked over to my neighbor again and it seemed weird to me that he was not doing anything. I told myself to shut up and that to forget about it! The guy was probably an Italian. The next time I looked over, I froze. He had pulled out some kind of a pamphlet or small book and the text was in arabic! Oh horrors! This guy could be....... I turned to Luigi and motioned with my eyes for him to look at the man next to me. Luigi didn't understand. "What!", he said loudly to overcome the noise of the Airplane. I just sat there for a while, but finally made him understand. He looked over once, then looked at me and laughed and went back to his reading.

O.K. So I am a little paranoid. (But he was not with us on the next leg between Newark and Milano.)

We Landed at Malpensa Airport in Milano. His sister was there to meet us. Malpensa is one of three Airports there. Linate is right in the city. Malpensa happens to be about an hour outside of the city.

It was Friday morning and we were told it was a Holiday weekend. The car was not moving. We sat on the Autostrada with nothing happening. I saw some people get out of their cars. It really was not going anywhere. And I had complained so much about the traffic in L.A. Ha! From not sleeping for over 24 hours I felt like a Zombie. So this was the start of my vacation......stuck in traffic in a foreign city and starved and tired out of my mind.........Luigi and his sister were conversing in Italian and I could not understand a single word...Ahhhhhh! (screaming in my brain)..................

(to be continued)