There’s a lot of places on our list of countries we want to visit. When we talked about a next trip Italy came up. I visited in 2000 and wanted the boys to see Rome. I also thought it would be neat to visit the village my grandmother was born. We looked at our calendars at the beginning of 2017 and realized with Aidan going to a new school, Brendan in (at least) a summer show and timing for Chris, it was going to be almost impossible to find a time to enjoy a family vacation. We joked about having to leave Christmas night. And then realized, it may be quite the perfect time to go away. We shared our plans with a few friends and our friends Paul and Heather decided they were up for an adventure too!

When planning we realized we wanted to leave after all the excitement of Christmas. We found a 9pm flight out of Boston. We had two choices for a layover. We decided to go with the longer one which meant we could spend day 1 of our trip in London!

We loved London when we visited in 2014. We took a quick tour and visited Trafalgar Square. It was funny how quickly the memories came back. We wished we had more time there but it was a fun way to break up the day. Because it was Boxing Day the express train wasn’t running so it cut into our fun time. We plan to find another time to go back.

We then headed on to Milan. Who knew there are two airports in Milan? And of course that oversight meant we ended up not very close to our hotel for the night. Luckily we were able to come up with a new plan and everyone took all the changes in stride.

Day 1 was a LONG day. It was full of transportation (planes, buses and taxis) but we made the best of it! And now we are in Italy!!