The Vacation is Over

I cannot believe that 3 weeks have already passed by and our vacation is over. I came back to my new hometown of Munich yesterday afternoon after a 7 hour and half train journey from Milan. This time however, the vacation ended very different from any other vacation I have taken in the past. This is the first vacation with my friends where at the end we each go back home separately: Karina took a 715 AM flight from Malpensa airport to Miami via Paris. Marelys took a750 AM flight from Linate airport to Madrid and I took the train at 7 AM. This is also the first vacation where for once I am not coming back to work and everything that comes with it: the hundreds of red e-mails in your Lotus Notes in-box, the numerous voice mail messages that need to be returned, the look of desperation from the poor soul that covered for you and is anxiously awaiting for your comeback so that he or she can get back to his/her job and of course that feeling of “what am I doing here?; I should have never come back from vacation”. But it is also the first time where I am not coming back to a first couple of days spent sharing stories and pictures of the vacation, getting phone calls from friends that are eager to see you and hear about how it all went, and not coming back to a home-cooked meal after several days of eating panninis, baguettes and all sort of sandwiches and carbs you pick up on the road.
For me it was a relaxing trip back home where I got to rest after 20 days filled with sightseeing activities, walks across towns, never ending steps leading to churches, domes, small towns on top of mountains, and long nights talking and catching up with my friends. I got to sleep for about 3 hours and woke up to what I believed was the border between Italy and Austria. I believed so because of the landscape and the small towns we were crossing at the time (Alpine looking mountains with snow still covering their peaks, forests along the mountains, small towns visible along side of the mountains and houses made of white painted concrete and dark or maple colored wood). It turned out to be that we were still in the northern part of Italy and we were still about an hour to an hour and a half from the border. I have to say that I was surprised by how “austro-germainc” (is this a word or am I making it up?) this part of Italy looked. I liked what I saw and now I will definitely consider visiting this region in one of my future travel plans. I spent the remainder of the trip listening to music, catching up with my book reading, sleeping some more and just enjoying the view. One of the best parts of the view was being able to see a sunny day with a clear blue sky. The last stretch of our vacation was filled with rainy and gloomy days so it was a great feeling to get back to Munich and find such a great weather. The train arrived about 20 minutes late (something almost unheard of in this country). One thing that you can count on as far as the train/bus/subway schedule in Germany is that they are always on time. I seriously think that this is the first time I experience tardiness in any mean of transportation in Germany; but hey, there is always a first time. As a matter of fact, I was glad we were late; it gave an extra power nap of 20 minutes!!!
I spend the rest of the day just chilling: a lot of it was consumed by downloading to my laptop the close to 500 pictures we took during the trip. You know me: I downloaded them, categorized them by place and date and renamed them accordingly, edited a couple of them that needed to be cropped etc etc. Now all I need is to finally be able to connect my laptop to a high-speed internet connection so I can upload them to the blog and start sharing them with you.