Who remembers 2019?
Do you see what 2020 has made me do? Because of the sheer ridiculousness of the present year, it has forced me to start a blog post as though I am a rubbish stand-up comedian. And it get's worse, because following several years of complete rank stupidity, it has become trite to criticize a single full circuit of the sun based upon the completely arbitrary points we have declared as the start and end of the 365 day cycle, which we have labelled with an arbitrary number based on when someone in Rome decided we should begin counting once.
All that is to say, sorry for calling 2020 ridiculous, it's just a year and it was wrong of me to suggest the previous one was much better just because I could go outside.
But yes, 2019, that near forgotten time when you could go on holiday without the fear of catching a deadly virus, or, worse (based on the insane people racing home before a 4am deadline a few weeks ago) being made to stay home with your family for a couple of weeks. (I mean seriously, where does anyone have to go that desperately that staying home is such an imposition? Don't say work. No-ones job is so important that their colleagues will be unable to cope for an additional 2 weeks).
I keep trying to talk about 2019, but it is possible that the year 2020 has had a far larger impact upon my writing than was initially intended. I'm sure it's fine, you probably wouldn't have noticed had I not pointed it out to you. Go back and look though. It's subtle but it's there.
We made use of our capacity to share a small flying breathing space with hundreds of similarly minded travelicians to spend a couple of days in Milan.
I had to check myself and confirm that this was in fact out only trip last year, and it was due to inconsistent work patterns and the fact that we decided to watch as much of the World Snooker Championship as possible in lieu of a holiday (in person at the crucible, TV watching habits have a limited impact upon our travel plans).
We booked ourselves into an AirBnB near the city centre, which gave use our own apartment and that brief feeling of being a local as you share your common areas with people who actually live there. Plus a really nice welcome basket from the owner filled with jams and those hard things that look like bread.
Unfortunately it rained while we were in Milan, but that is something that can be expected. When you take your holiday after the end of summer you're always rolling the weather dice and you know that any nice weather you do get is residual and left over from the summer you chose not to holiday during. But as the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons, take those lemon skins and stitch them together into a makeshift fruit umbrella. I think that's how it goes.
In this case, our makeshift fruit umbrella was one of those open top tour buses. Something we had never done while on holiday was ride around on an open top bus, but as it turns out, they have a canopy style roof for when it rains so you can still enjoy the sights, albeit the somewhat much greyer sights. Also, open top buses are perhaps the most touristy thing it is possible to do and I needed to balance out that brief local feeling.
Due to being on a loop and being intended to allow hopping on and off, open top bus tickets last for a period of days and cover all of the routes, so we took advantage and traveled all of the routes. Including the one that visited all of the sporting attractions like the football pitch and the local teams headquarters or whatever you would call the building adorned with footballers labelled with one of the teams names.
It wasn't all rain and buses, we actually got off the buses in some locations and some of the days, the weather was quite nice. Here was a... building we visited. I really need to start taking notes.
I don't have a story about this picture, I just like it. I like how you can see some of the actual street the photograph is situated on around it. It isn't the same location behind it, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this image while I was just trawling through my photographs looking for things to share, so I decided that I would.
So yes, a quiet year for holidays abroad, but no matter, I'm sure we'll get to visit lots of places in 2020...
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