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Published: June 14th 2017
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Geo: 46.1445, 8.72654
It was a long flight, but easier than the flight to Singapore. Matthew was asleep on the floor of the airport, and had to be walked onto the flight without opening his eyes, to the amusement of the flight attendants. Still, we all got a few hours sleep, and the flight was uneventful.
Arrival into Milan at 7.20am local time, to see that the sun was just rising and there was a heavy frost everywhere - outside temperature -5 degrees! That humidity of Singapore seemed a long way away! We were really quick through baggage claims etc, and managed to get on the 8.20am bus from Malpensa airport to Lugano - the nice man even charged all of us as children when Steven didn't have enough Euro in cash for our fares!
80 minutes later, and we were in Switzerland and in Lugano. The story behind is bus trip is ridiculous - we are hiring a car one way from here to Dusseldorf, where we will fly to Venice. It is obligatory to have snow tyres in Switzerland, Germany and Belgium at this time of year, but the Italians would only give us a at with snow tyres if we
returned it to Italy. But they (Hertz!) were happy to rent us the car without the snow tyres, even though that would mean we were breaking the law in our agreed drop off point! We gave up arguing with them, and instead just hired the car over the border in Switzerland, so there were no such problems!
After a brioche at a cafe, we grabbed taxis and went to the car hire place, where we collected a fairly new Peugot 5008 (7 seater). Very nice, although Tom was hoping we had been given the Ferrari parked in the carpark instead! An uneventful drive to Ascona, stopping only at Tenero at a discount shoe barn to buy Tom some shoes without holes!
A promenade along the esplanade at Ascona, in the sun, was just wonderful. We had delicious pizzas for lunch (G had lasagna, as always, and I had polenta con funghi - yum!) and a walk through the cobblestone streets, ending up at the toy store where we saw an amazing ball magno-course (cubico?) and a board game that we bought for the kids.
Then, onto Ronco. It is hard, with the 3 sets of zii, to know who to visit
first - this time, we dropped in on Zio Luciano to find that Zia was at tombola (bingo), visited Zio Marcello, where Gabriella was also at tombola, then got in trouble (gently) for not having gone straight to Zia Teresa, who skipped tombola to wait for us!!!! Many hugs all round of to see these lovely part of our family, lots of kisses for the kids and telling them how much they had grown! I was impressed - we put Georgia on the Via Nosetta and told her to find Teresa's front door, and she led us straight to it! We followed Zio Romano up to Il Monte, where they had prepared everything for us, including a roaring fire. They are so good to us. Then back to Teresa's for pasta and to see Eurosia...by then, we worked out it was after 1am for the kids, Singapore time, and we headed back up the mountain for 11 hours of glorious sleep!!!
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