Into the Wild, Blue Yonder...

I'm curious, have any of you (all 3 of my readers) done any significant traveling with a 7-month old? It's probably not ideal conditions, but we decided that we needed to go for it while we were only 1.5 hours from Italy by plane, rather than 10+.

We began with an early morning flight to Venice. In order to avoid bringing a car seat, we determined that the metro and then the Orlybus should get us there in time (unfortunately, the train to Orly requires several changes from our house, and since the metro starts running at 5:30 and our plane was a 7:30, we opted for the bus which we thought would be quicker). So at 5:30, we were standing on the metro platform, freezing our tooshes off. Unfortunately, the train did not reach our stop until 5:40. Then there was some problem on the track (we were only trying to go 5 stops!), and we sat at a stop for about 15 minutes. Then we sat at the next stop for another 5-10. Finally, we reach the stop that meets the Orlybus, only to find that the next bus would not be leaving for another 20 minutes (they're supposed to go every 12 minutes). By this point, it's 6:30. We could not wait. So (don't tell the Paris police... or the grandparents, for that matter), we asked the cabby nearby if he would take us without a car seat. He said no problem.

We arrived in time and had smooth sailing from there on... And we won the bad parents badge of the year. (But, in our defense, at least there is NO ONE on the roads in Paris before 7 am.) I feared that it was a sign of what was to come for this trip, but thankfully, I was wrong. The rest of the trip was FABULOUS, and I promise more posts coming soon to describe it all.

For now, suffice it to say that the food, the people, the sights, and even the baby were all incredible. And, because I enjoyed these, I leave you with two pictures of the Alps in the early morning, taken on our flight from Paris to Venice:

Ciao~