Day 2: Friday July 23rd, 2004 Read Short Version View Photos

Short Version Instructions: Only read every other paragraph.

We woke up and went down to breakfast, which wasn't bad. They had cereals, yogurt, fruit and some crappy pastries. We then went to go get on the bus, but nobody thought to tell us we'd need our passports since we were going to Switzerland that day. So we schlepped back up to our room, got our passports then came back down to find the back of the bus had been taken over. So we became the middle of the bus crew for that leg of the journey.

Thumbs Down: Not having any idea
what our itinerary is We drove all the way up past Lake Como, through traffic, through tunnels up a valley to some little town. We were running late even though we left on time, and we didn't actually know when our train was supposed to leave, and our bus driver, who doesn't speak English, didn't know where the train station was. We stopped in some parking lot, which wasn't actually anywhere near the train station, and milled around for 5 minutes until the bus driver figured out where the station was. It was now 10:28, and we thought the train left at 10:00, 10:15, or 10:30, depending on who you asked.

We all crowded into the train station to discover... our train didn't leave until 10:50, which gave us 10 minutes to go get some peach gelato. Grampie then asked us to go see if there was a dining car, so we walked all the way to the front of the train, discovered there was none, and as we were walking back they opened up the back car for our group, who all piled in. Being the cliquey group that we are, we wanted to sit together, however there weren't even 3 seats left together. So we sat in the other side of the car, which was empty. This apparently was first class though, and we quickly got kicked out when the ticket lady came through, and had to scatter ourselves throughout the car.

Thumbs Up: Train rides to Switzerland I thought the train ride was pretty fun, although the rest of the X-Men (see Thomas) got bored pretty quickly. It took us from that town up the mountains, back and forth and into Switzerland. The higher we went the cooler it got, which was good because even though we had all the windows in the train open, it was still pretty hot. We stood in the back for a lot of the trip, successfully re-cliqued, and eventually made it past glaciers and waterfalls to St. Moritz, which is a touristy alpine town full of swanky hotels.

We were all starving so we ate at the little café at the station which wasn't bad, but didn't have much variety. Tyler, Jessie and I all had hot dogs (which were inside of hollowed out baguettes filled with ketchup, 90% of which was at the bottom) and Tori had a salami sandwich. We the got some snacks and got on the bus (which met us at the station) with our new tour guide, reclaiming our position at the back, and proceeded to drive all over the place in southern Switzerland, often retracing our steps. The tour guide was very anti- development, which proved to be somewhat amusing. "This is the most beautiful area, and look at the new apartments they are building. It's a disgrace."

After a couple hours, we ditched the tour guide back at the train station and took this extremely windy (as in back in forth) road back into Italy and back to Milan. I dozed on and off most of the way.

Thumbs Up: Thomas At some point during this day we decided to keep a journal of our inside jokes and thoughts of the moment and whatnot. Tori had just such a journal that we could use, and we began recording our hilarious antics in it.

Thumbs Down: Eating at the same
restaurant two nights in a row We got back to the hotel then left for dinner at the same restaurant as the previous night. Now, the food wasn't bad or anything, but let's be serious, there has to be 300 acceptable restaurants within walking distance of our hotel. We procured the end of a table and nobody wanted to sit by us, which was fine by me. At least the menu was different, crispy pitas, grilled vegetables, rigatoni with marinara sauce, and roast beef and fried potato wedges, with a cup of fruit in syrup for dessert. At some point Tyler joked that we should name our journal Thomas, so a name was born.

Thumbs Up: Free internet access
in the lobby of the hotel We again ditched dinner early and went back to our room and fired up the Neo, which somehow caused Tyler to break his bed. After struggling with it, kicking the girls out of the room, then fixing it, I did some packing, some emailing and then went to bed.