GETTING AROUND

In Europe, just like at home, public transportation is your best bet – beginning with your arrival.  A cab from Heathrow into London would have cost a hundred bucks!  Instead, we took the underground, which turned out to be a pleasant ride that was actually above-ground for most of the way.  It brought us a few blocks from our destination.  We’ve also taken the train from Kastrup airport in Copenhagen to my sister-in-law’s house in the suburbs.

One of my worst travel experiences was spending three days in Paris with a car.  The traffic and parking were unpleasant, time-consuming, and costly.  We would have been a lot better off on the Metro.

Sometimes being frugal can backfire: we decided not to spend the extra money on a GPS system on our rental car and boy, did we regret it!  We were headed towards an agriturismo that was located about an hour south of Milan.  Benni was the driver, and I was the navigator.  I learned something on that trip: I learned that I cannot read maps.  We left Milan and, after three confusing hours getting nowhere, we realized that we were going north, not south.  The give-away was the line of uniformed guards as we approached the Swiss border.  Not a happy day.