Tag: European travel

Years before we moved to Sweden, I heard stories of amazingly cheap inter-European flights. Expats living in the UK whisking away to Spain and Italy on a $20-weekend excursion. But disappointingly, since we have been in Sweden I have found that these bargains are almost nonexistent. Either we are too far north to benefit from these legendary deals, or they are just that, legends of the past, a memory of the days of cheap carrier price wars. It is actually very rare to find even a $25 one-way flight anywhere from Copenhagen, except to Milan.

For some reason, Italy’s fashion capital is the exception. I often see extremely cheap tickets to this less frequented Italian city, so when Kip and River began planning their epic motorcycle adventure to Italy, I noticed Ryanair was offering one-way flights for $17.

The more we thought about it, we realized Micah and I could fly to Milan, stay for a couple of days and then meet the men in northern Italy to help them drive back through Germany to Sweden. It was a simple plan that would allow Micah to see a little bit more of Europe while she lived with us for the summer.

Bergamo

By the time we ended up buying our last-minute plane tickets, it was more like $30 each, but it was still cheaper than a train ticket to Stockholm, or a train ticket from LA to San Diego for that matter.

Flying into Milan on Ryanair usually means arriving in Bergamo, a small city about 50 kilometers outside of Milan. Most people take the 5 Euro bus directly into Milan from there, but we wanted to have an old town Italian experience first, so we took public transit through Bergamo to a funicular that took us up a hill to the old town of Bergamo where we stayed at an Airbnb apartment in the old walled city.

Our Airbnb apartment, another bargain for $70 including fees, was on a narrow, quiet cobblestone street, near enough to a convent to hear beautiful church bells on the hour, at the evening vespers and again first thing in the morning. The old stone buildings with their wooden shutters and balcony laundry lines seemed to be preserved in time, unaffected by either progress or war.

We walked around the old town like two kids in Fantasyland and someone mentioned it seemed like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride or the Pinocchio ride must be hidden somewhere around the corner.

“It’s like Disneyland, but the real thing,” Micah must have said as many times as I did. It reminded me of C.S. Lewis’s concept of Shadowlands, the idea that everything good in this life is a mere shadow of the real thing beyond.

We found a restaurant and ordered pasta. It was some of the best I had ever had, and when I took a picture of Micah I thought about my Italian friend Marlo who insisted we stop by her parents’ house in Pittsburg after we took Micah to the Pittsburg Zoo for the first time.

When Marlo’s mom found out that Micah had never eaten spaghetti, she was delighted, overjoyed, to watch her try it for the first time. I think Micah was about 9 months old, trying her first spaghetti to an audience of enthusiastic Italian women.  I wish I had a picture from that moment, and I found myself trying to make up for it by taking a picture right then. Sometimes honoring the past is embracing the present.

Milan

Micah did not know that Milan was known for fashion. I thought that was hilarious, and I mentioned it every time I looked up an article about Milan and found that it started with a description of Milan being the fashion capital of the world.

However, what Micah did know about Milan was far more substantive. Having just finished a church history class at Colorado Christian University, she was exuding with information about the Edict of Milan that legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, Ambrose the brave bishop who stood up to the emperor and Ambrose’s own protégé, a philosopher-turned-theologian that even I was familiar with, the great St. Augustine of Hippo.

She highly recommended me listening to her Audible copy of The Story of Christianity, so while we were flying to Milan I listened to the chapters pertaining to the city’s history and we were able to talk about the historical relevance of the churches and people who occupied that city more than 1500 years ago. We spent most of our time in Duoma, Milan’s overwhelming cathedral, and to Micah’s utter delight, we saw the fairly recently unearthed archeological site where Ambrose baptized St. Augustine in 386.

In Milan we stayed at a youth hostel with bunk beds and shared dorm rooms. With the exception of the remote mountain lodge that the kids and I stayed in last summer when we hiked the Kungsladen in Lapland, I had never actually stayed in a shared dorm room. It is a little outside the typical American traveling experience, and I was a little worried that it might be strange. But it was actually fine and I was glad to share the company of a few other women along our journey. I suppose as an American I tend to think of the risk of sharing sleeping quarters with strangers instead of the benefit, but in a high-quality youth hostel like the one we stayed in, I think there is actually more security in the temporary community of fellow travelers.

We spent a little time walking around the fashion areas of Milan, buying nothing. We found a chain store on a side street away from the high-end Italian brand stores, and Micah bought a little black dress that looked amazing on her. And I felt that our Milan experience was complete.

After a little over 24 hours in Milan, we took a train to Turin where we met Kip and River. They were tired and happy, having been on motorcycles on Alpine trails for the past four days. But they were happy to see us, especially since I had ordered pizza at a typical Italian-Middle Eastern restaurant called Pizza Kabab and it was ready as soon as they arrived. I laughed about the fact that the only pizza we ate in Italy was not particularly Italian, but it was pretty good anyway. Not everything has to be authentic to be authenticly good.