Flying to Italy

This is the first in a series of blogposts that were not done in real time during my recent trip to Italy.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

So, today was the day that Nick and I took off for our trip to Italy. I left my room at about 11am for our many, many hours of travel ahead of us. First I spent about half an hour walking to the Cambridge train station, then, from there, travelled into London, across the Underground, and back out to Gatwick Airport. This took almost as much time, and cost almost as much money, as the plane flight from Gatwick to Venice itself. I finally got to Gatwick about half an hour before Nick, but didn’t have much to do until he arrived. He eventually got there, and we checked in without too much hassle – I even managed to successfully fit my carryon into one of those bin thingies they do to test whether they are too big. Then, we wandered around the terminal for a while. I determined that airport McDonald’s is wayyy cheaper than airport Burger King’s, and got a hamburger because I was having a starvation attack and Nick didn’t bring any lunch food for me. Then, we found the free-sample-booze-stand, which was fun because they were making cocktails with like lemon and blackberry, which was really pretty good. We looked around all the iPod stores, too. Extra fun.

Finally, it was time to board, and we got decent seats near the back of the plane. EasyJet doesn’t assign seats, so we had to sort of elbow each other in the mad-rush-free-for-all. I insisted on the window seat, so Nick had to have the middle seat, but he guarded the aisle seat aggressively while people were choosing, which meant that we ended up with the row to ourselves.

After we took off, it was actually a pretty unscary flight. I slept for some of it, which no doubt made Nick happy. Extra good was the fact that when we got to Italy, they unloaded us out of both the front and the rear doors of the plane, which meant that we were some of the first ones off. Luggage wasn’t too much of a problem, and I got a Venezia passport stamp, which made me happy. We then had to find the waterbus to our hotel on the Lido, which was a bit more of a struggle, but again not impossible. We found the Alilaguna, which was a small boat that looked about 30 years old and struggled over the wakes made by other boats, but made it to the Lido eventually. Nick and I were kind of panicked that we wouldn’t be able to figure out when we got to the Lido, but because a lot of tourists stay there the boat operators made it pretty clear. Success!

The Lido is an island just off of the main part of Venice that was a really popular and upmarket beach destination in the early twentieth century. Since then, it’s definitely gotten cheaper, but it was actually very well-suited for us, because we didn’t have to drag luggage all over the narrow streets of Venice proper. Instead, we managed to pop off the dock in Venice and walk almost immediately to our hotel, which was pretty good.

We were staying at the Hotel Le Boulevard, a decently nice hotel on the Lido. I think during prime tourist season, it would be a lot more expensive, but we were definitely there in the off-season. In fact, the whole of the Lido was pretty abandoned, and a large number of the hotels on it were closed entirely for the winter. But Nick and I did well.

We made it up to our pretty small (or “poky” in British English, as I later learned) room, and then went out for food searches on the Lido. We found a small pizzeria and got dinner there without too many problems. Success! Then, by this point, it was about 10:30 or 11pm Italian time, so we headed back to the hotel for bed. This would have gone slightly faster, but Nick and I got into a long conversation about the best way to arrange boarding so as to optimize happiness on the choose-your-own-seats EasyJet flights. We (well, I) came up with a pretty good algorithm, in my opinion. I’ll explain it in person if you want to know, because it’s the sort of thing that involves complex explanations and diagrams and all that sort of thing. So that was our day of travel to Venice. Stay tuned for more updates on the rest of the Italy trip!