Oversleeping in the rain...

After 3-days in Milan we were ready to move on and strike out on our own. Having Antonio and his apartment to land at was terrific, but after so much preparation and logistics, not to mention travel we were ready to get on with our adventure. Despite this we almost missed our train to Genoa. Both Susan and I struggled more than anticipated adjusting to jet lag and time differences, not to mention that I was only slowly getting over a cold I brought with me on our trip. So, ear plugs, and unintentional use of the total black-out shades in the room we were staying in led us to oversleep, awaking to steady rain several hours later than planned and totally out of it.

We almost opted to hang in Milan another day, but in the end scrambled to get ourselves and gear out the door. Antonio insisted on escorting us through multiple Metro transfers all the way to the train platform, which although we tried to tell him was unnecessary, was in the end appreciated as we were both pretty groggy and the whole morning had a dream-like quality. We said goodbye, the train pulled out into the rain, and I promptly past out as we sped by Milan's sprawling sub-burbs.

Genoa, still raining, we sought out a hotel and despite the weather were feeling pretty glad we were on our way. Spent the rest of the afternoons exploring Genoa (birthplace of Cristofo Columbus and Pesto) and enjoyed wandering the narrow cobblestone walkways, ancient architecture, and the bustling vibe.

In our rush to leave Milan we left our Euro-plug adapter and took about a pound more tools than we planned on - after extensive searching we found another functional (but chunky) adapter, and the tools will hopefully just be ballast (if we didn't need them to pack the bikes back up for their return I would have been tempted to unload them. So much for all our gram counting and repacking before departure.