German Railways Cancelled Our Trip To Milan This Spring
And brought us to the most beautiful place in Switzerland.
Our holiday in Northern Italy was great. We saw Venezia, La Spezia and the Cinque Terre. But we still had one city ahead of us: Milano.
There was a 3.5-hour train ride from La Spezia to Milano Centrale and we had booked a room in the Hilton Hotel almost next to the train station of Milano.
But suddenly, the morning we would leave, I got a notification that German Railways would strike on the day we were going back home to the Netherlands.
That sucked.
We couldn’t use any delays on our way home from Mannheim to Leeuwarden. I thought of something radical. We had to skip Milano.
But at first, that would cost us the first day of our hotel room. Which was around 250 euros.
Quite a lot of money.
I still did it, with the request to waive the fee. Luckily, they did! Still thankful for that Hilton!
We planned for Basel to go that evening.
And once we got to the train station we were asked by the local police to show our identity cards or passports. I don’t have a clue why. This was never asked before.
But we did it and moved on.
The train arrived and we had to hurry to make it to the right carriage. It was all the way in the back and the train was already leaving so we decided to just hop on the train and walk to our seats from within.
The bad news was that our seats were on a different one.
We had to quickly switch carriages at a stop in Monterosso. Once we got our seats, we were set for 3.5 hours to travel around the Italian Riviera coast.
We were really early at the station of Genova and had to wait there for 20 minutes in order to leave at the correct time.
Once arrived in Milano we had a 40-minute layover for our train to Lugano (Switzerland). The train was not very big so luckily we booked a first-class ticket and had a seat and some room for our luggage.
On that train we decided that we didn’t want to go to Basel anymore, it was another 2–3 hours from Lugano and we just wanted to lay in our hotel and don’t do anything for the rest of the day.
That’s when I booked a room at Hotel Federale in the center of Lugano.
Lugano is such a beautiful place.
That night we had “Dinner” at McDonald’s in the most beautiful building you’ll ever see a McDonald’s in.
Take a look.
But then it started to rain. Pouring.
I didn’t bring my umbrella so it was a little bit uncomfortable but we managed to get through it and reach our hotel.
Since I was in this beautiful Ticino area in Switzerland I definitely wanted to take some pictures at night, so we waited for the rain to stop, and at around 7–8 p.m. we started exploring the town a little bit more.
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