Mille grazi por tutti

Hopefully that's Italian for MANY THANKS FOR EVERYTHING for everyone who acted as a yellow pages, travel agent, travel insurance, private secretary, and internet search engine yesterday...

(If you want to know what happened read on, if not just accept my thanks and you can end here)

I'm currently writing this from... (drum roll) Stansted airport, where I arrived at 1am this morning. The full story is that due to a typically Italian smash up on the motorway, the Ryanair-provided shuttle bus from town-of-historic-interest to airport-in-the-middle-of -nowhere did not have enough time to get to the airport.

We arrived - along with 29 other passengers - 2 minutes after check in closed. In all, 50 passengers were denied boarding at a cost of 60Euro per flight change. A nice little earner for Mr O Leary.

Naturally tiny Verona Brescia, Milan Bergamo and all the other obscure airports not anywhere near their names could not host this number of people so our options were to stand by for flights in the next 2 days or drive 200 kms to Bologna and take the only seats left on Tuesday.

So after much hiring of cars, sleeping in airports, driving to airports, getting lost on Italian motorways, not finding anything open in Siesta, rationing of food and threatening of other passengers we found ourself on a short list to London... It was make of break for me as there was only one seat left connecting to Finland and it could not be booked from Italy but I am glad to say at six am this morning, I got the last seat and the adventures shall continue...

On a more pleasant note: Verona is very agreeable, the opera was excellent, Aida was amazing - particularly with a full moon back drop, sweetcorn should not be on pizza, you can get drunk on campari, and if you're ever on the Autostrade A4 from Verona to Brescia, the B roads make a beautiful detour.

I'm off to wash my socks in the airport toilets...