It's official - Susan has her first grey hair. We're calling it the "Europe Hair" as it was no doubt caused by all of the stress that went into planning this trip that we're on right now.

We wanted to leave Venice early today (we're driving to Milan), but we didn't get on the road until about 10:30am. We thought it was supposed to be a 5 hour drive, so we were happy when Daniel said we would arrive by 1pm. However, we hit traffic and then Daniel told us to exit the toll road only to re-enter 3 km later (that's right, slowed down by driving on surface streets AND we had to pay two tolls). In the end, we arrived in Milan around 2pm. We checked into our very nice 4-star hotel (found via PriceLine) and set off for the Duomo. We went inside and Ivan got the audioguide to learn more while Claire and Susan explored some shops (and Susan bought a souvineer notebook). Around 4:30pm we joined up with Ivan's old classmate, Azamat, who showed us around the city and treated us to the typical Italian evening snack: "Macchiato" - a tiny cup of coffee with frothy cream and sugar to taste. It was better than "typical" coffee, but Claire and Susan, with their decidedly "anti-coffee" mindsets weren't won over.

We bid farewell to Azamat, who drove off in an interesting enclosed BMW motorcycle (Ivan thinks he'd like one of those) and then went to a pizza place for dinner. On the way back to our hotel, we bought some ice cream bars for dessert and returned to the hotel to relax and retire at a decent hour.

Labels: Europe 2008, Italy