Saturday Morning Views from the Air

I looked around at a lot of options and as I expected, at that time of year, flights were expensive. I finally settled on a non-stop flight from Philadelphia to Milan on US Airways. This option saved us over $400.00 over the next best option.

Our flight was scheduled to leave Philadelphia at 4:25 pm on Friday, 29 June, 2007. Around 10:00 am on Friday we left home. It is about a four hour drive to Philadelphia and I wanted to leave plenty of time in case of traffic, and also, because it was an international flight, we had to be at the airport about two hours before the scheduled flight time. We had a pleasant drive to Philly, parked the car and got checked in and through security with little problem. After we got to the gate, we found out that the flight was going to be late. Not a big surprise with US Airways!

The flight was about as you would expect for a flight to Europe in coach — long and uncomfortable. The meals were OK, the movies were forgetable and the flight attendants were pleasant.

Here is a view of the foothills of the Alps as we got close to Milan on Saturday morning.

If you look closely, you can see some bales of hay in the fields in the lower left part of this photo.

Another view of the ground as we got close to Malpensa Airport, which is located west of Milan.

Malpensa Airport

And here is a view of Malpensa Airport as we landed.

Our flight was scheduled to land at 6:35 am and we landed right around that time, even after taking off late. I guess we made up some time with the jet stream behind us.

Once we landed we followed the signs to immigration where we had to show our passports. It was a little confusing at some points but we managed to go the right way. We ended up in a line that didn't seem to be moving for a while. Then it started moving and as we got to a spot where we could see what was going on, we could see that there was only one or two windows open. As it was only about 06:35 when we landed this was not unusual, but they should have been ready for us if they knew a plane was supposed to be landing this early. Slowly more and more windows opened up and we got through to baggage claim.

Since it had taken so long our luggage was already there, so we went on through customs where we just walked on through and then found the auto rental counters. After a short wait we got our car and headed out to Parma.