Home Sweet Home

May 1 and 2 were filled with travel to get us back to Venice for our flight back to Calgary. Try as we might, we couldn't convince the airline to allow us to fly out of anywhere else but Venice. Very dumb.

We hopped a train at 9:30 in the morning of May 1 in Munich and arrived at Venice Mestre at about 5:30 pm. It was long, but not too bad, since we basically just sat around all day. There were some nice older Italian ladies sitting across from us and they loved Owen. Neither spoke any English, but I'd heard enough Italians gushing over Owen to know. They were so cute.

We took a cab to our hotel, since we didn't really know how to get there, and didn't care to figure it out. It was a lot farther from the train station than I thought. The cab cost about 20 Euro!

We ate dinner at a family resturant "about 300m down the street from our hotel" according to the innkeeper. I don't know if he was right, but it was really far! Dinner was decent, but like all resturants in Europe, it took forever for us to get the bill, and Owen was loosing it!

Owen slept in the bathroom, again. At least this one didn't smell at all.

May 2 was the longest day ever... we woke up at 4:30 to get to the airport for our flight to Amsterdam at 7:05am. We arrived in Amsterdam one hour and 50 minutes later. Our flight from Amsterdam to Calgary wasn't until 13:30 so we had some time to kill, and Kris really wanted to go to the red light district of Amsterdam to eat a "space brownie", if you know what I mean. So we hopped a train into town. I've got to be honest, I was pretty aprehensive leaving the airport, even knowing that there was AMPLE time to do so. I just don't travel very well. The weather didn't cooperate with us. It started raining shortly after we got off the train and it was pretty cold. None of us was dressed for it. However, Kris managed to accomplish his mission. We would have explored further, but we were all pretty cold and miserable, so we headed back to the airport. In through customs and ready to go.

We got on the plane at 13:30 and arrived in Calgary around 2 hours later. The flight was delayed, I think because of some course corrections along the way and to avoid Iceland all together. Yea... I watched the flight path from time to time. I know, dork! Owen napped 3 or 4 times during the trip.

When we arrived in Calgary, we got stuck in the customs line... it was, after all, Sunday. I guess there were a number of other intercontinental flights that landed all around the same time. It was brutal.

We managed to get Owen to bed at 8:00 local time and then ourselves at about 9:30. In total, we'd been up for about 26 hours. Whew!