Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day 1 (Milan)

February 7

Last night, we were just getting to sleep when our 2 AM "wake up" period occurred so it was a long time before we actually got to sleep. Experts say that you adapt to about 1 hr. of time difference per day. If this is so, we should start to feel normal just about when we switch from Milano to Cortino!

After barely making it to breakfast in time, Steve spent the late morning and early afternoon blogging while Beth read one of the six books that she brought to read on this trip. Then it was time to head back to the Rho area, this time for women's 3000 meter long-track speed skating. 

Despite being a few cards short of a full deck, Steve knew it was going to be a good day when at the first metro stop, a group of four people in blue snowsuits got on the train and one immediately came up and asked if he would like to trade pins. He was wearing a China team pin but instead showed Steve a couple of pins that he would like to trade. Steve did not immediately recognize the NOC logo and asked what it was. He replied "Kazakhstan". It was only then that Steve noticed that the blue outfits had Qazaqstan (which is how the people in that nation spell it) on them. Of course Steve would be happy to trade! The Kazak selected a Valentine's Day pin from Salt Lake City 2002. This made Steve smile because Valentine's Day always occurs during the Winter Olympics and he is always sure to have at least one on his vest at all times!

Speed skating is the Dutch national sport, so it was no surprise when we got to our seats and saw this:

Dutch people wear orange because their royal family is from the House of Orange. By the time the event started, we guessed that perhaps half of the stands were full of orange-clad Dutchmen (and a good percentage of those not wearing orange might have been Dutch also). There was about an hour before the event started and there was a brass band performing that looked familiar:

When the introduction named them as the Royal Kleintje Pils, we weren't surprised. This is the same band that we have seen at every Winter Olympics we've attended since Nagano in 1998 (their bio says that they were also in Calgary in 1988 but we didn't take note of them there). We do remember them trying to teach the Japanese how to do the wave (you haven't lived until you see a man carrying a tuba running along trying to start the wave)!

Today's event is the 3000-meter race which covers 12.5 laps of the 400-meter track. Racers go two at a time and have to cross-over from inside to outside lane several times so that both skaters skate the same distance. American Greta Myers:

skated in the first pair and was making her Olympic debut. She was not supposed to be in this race, but yesterday, world record holder Martina Sablikova from Czechia had to withdraw due to an illness. This was a serious bummer to us because Sablikova, age 38, had only come back this year to try to win another Olympic medal (and likely say her professional good-byes) and this was her best event. But this is great for Greta. This might be a good place to point out that probably 95% of all of the Olympic athletes never win anything. Going to the Olympics after years of hard work is the reward, so while Greta did not win her pairing and finished last, she was thrilled to be able to compete on the world's biggest stage.

The 3000 meter is a long enough race that there is a significant amount of strategy. Racers have to decide whether to go out fast and try to hang on at the end or start slowly and try to increase their speed gradually during the whole race. Each skater has at least one coach on the backstretch giving them split times to help the skaters judge their effort level. There is also a big advantage to being able to grab a short boost by drafting behind the other skater during the cross-over from inside to outside lane:

There is a lot of technology that goes into getting the images for broadcasting the event. We counted four types. There are the now common cameras on cables and a special camera on a high-speed track around the outside of the oval (also commonly used in track and field - see upper left of the second picture):

But there were two types we were previously unaware of. The first is a robot that covers the inside of the oval in each corner and the second is a small drone that follows some distance behind the pair toward the end of the race:

After the first five pairs, there is a break to resurface the ice so that the later skaters (who should be the fastest) aren't disadvantaged. Then it was time for the medal contenders to skate. In honor of Steve's trade with the Kazaks, we have a picture of their best skater, Nadezhda Morozova:

She set a personal best time of 4:01.200 minutes in the 7th pair. Next up was Valerie Maltais from Canada and Francesca Lollobrigida from Italy:

Both of these racers were probably considered slightly past their primes, Francesca's 35th birthday is today (and is coming off the birth of her first child in May 2023) and Valerie is a few months older. If the Francesca's name sounds vaguely familiar, it should (if you are over the age of 60!). The famous actress Gina Lollobrigida is her great aunt. We have watched all of the long-track world cup races this year on TV so it was not a surprise when Francesca roared out of the start (she is a go fast and hold on kind of skater). Here she is drafting on Maltais:

Usually, Francesca burns out at the end of the race but today was one of those rare times when an athlete produces an effort that they don't even know that they are capable of. She finished in a time of 3:54.28, nearly 7 seconds ahead of Morozova.  The Italian fans went crazy! Even more incredible, that time was Francesca's personal fastest time ever and a new Olympic record on what is probably considered a very slow ice surface (at least compared to the high-altitude ovals in Calgary and Salt Lake City where most records are set). The Dutch fans, always great sports, recognized a great performance when they saw one and were on their feet as well. The Dutch fans also knew that they had two skaters, both ranked top five in the world, in the last two pairs. As Francesca sat in the warmup area with her head in her hands, first Marijke Groenewoud from the Netherlands and Ragne Wiklund from Norway and then Isabelle Weidemann from Canada and reigning world champion Joy Beune from the Netherlands tried to catch her and failed. The final results were Francesca Lollobrigida, gold, Ragne Wiklund, silver, and Valerie Maltais, bronze. After the victory, Francesca looked like she could hardly believe what had happened:

The Dutch fans on the metro going back to the hotel were a little down, but they have many more events in both long-track and short-track in which their athletes are considered the favorites for medals. We grab a quick dinner at a local Greek place down the street and go back to the hotel in the hope of finally getting a decent night's sleep.

Tomorrow, we have women's ice hockey. Enjoy!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day 0 (Milan)

February 6

After another crummy night's sleep, we wake up just in time to grab a shower and get down to breakfast before they close down at 10 AM. This means that there will not be much exploring around Milan today before we leave for the Opening Ceremonies. For weeks, the organizing committee has been bombarding us with messages saying that the gates to the stadium open four hours before the show starts at 8 PM and that they strongly recommend that we come on the early side. Four hours seems a little crazy to us, so we plan to get there two hours early. The stadium is in the same general direction as the ice hockey game we saw yesterday, so we know that we will need to leave the hotel around 3:30 PM.  Steve also has to work on the blog (it doesn't write itself!) so we decide to walk around the canals that the Navigli (pronounced nah-VEE-lee) neighborhood is known for, have a good-sized lunch (since we will be eating stadium food for dinner), and then head to the Opening Ceremonies.

We ask the concierge directions to the canals. He tells us that it is just across the plaza across the street from the hotel and then throws in a complication to our plans. He tells us that the Olympic Torch relay is going to be down by the canals at 3 PM.

The walk along the canal is quite scenic even through there are bars and restaurants every few feet on both sides:

Along our walk, we run into one of the same groups of Dutch women that we saw yesterday at the Duomo. We told them that we thought that they were working at Holland House today and they said that they were, but that it doesn't open until 3 PM. We told them that we would try to stop by sometime during our stay in Milan since it is so close to our hotel.

We cross over the canal at one of the bridges so that we can walk back in the sunshine although it is already a balmy 55F. On the bridge, we see that the Italians also have the tradition of couples putting a lock on the bridge to celebrate their everlasting bond:

We find a restaurant (as opposed to a bar that serves some food) and order a couple of pizzas (one porcini mushrooms, white ham and gruyere cheese and the other tomato and cheese) along with a side salad and some grilled vegetables since we are both seriously short on veggies compared to our normal diets. The pizzas were about 12" in diameter, but since they have a very thin crust, they were still about a single serving each.

Feeling much better, we continue back toward the hotel and can see that a crowd is developing along the canal. We find a place to stand on a bridge near the end of the canal. A group of English-speaking people arrive shortly later and we strike up a conversation. It turned out that they are from Oakland, CA and that, except for a brief visit at the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, this is their first Olympics. They are very interested to hear what we are going to see in Milan and what we have thought about previous Olympics.

After about 15 minutes, we see a guy dressed in the almost all white uniforms that the Olympic torch bearers wear. We guess that this is the person who the current torchbearer will hand off the Olympic flame to. He arrives by kayak:

so we are wondering if the torch will also be arriving by kayak. We are also trying to figure out from which direction the torch will arrive. This is hard to tell because people are now lined up about three people deep along both sides of the canal. Three PM comes and goes, and while the police presence has increased, the torch arrival does not seem imminent. We only need a quick stop at the hotel before we have to leave so we decide to wait. More police arrive and move the crowd on the opposite bank away from the canal, but it isn't clear how that helps the torch arrive or meet up with the next torchbearer, who has now situated himself on the shore near where the gondola was in the previous picture.

While we are trying to figure this out, the crowd behind us toward our hotel suddenly increases and we realize that the current torchbearer (the white beanie barely visible in the center right) is going to go along the opposite bank. Here is a picture:

As you can see, running with the torch is a misnomer. He can hardly even walk fast given the crowds. We would love to see how the handoff of the flame is accomplished, but we are now overdue to leave for the Opening Ceremonies, so we head back to the hotel and then off to the metro.

There are two stations that we use to get to the stadium. We choose the station that is a longer walk from the station thinking that most people will take the other option. The crowd at the station is not very big so this might have been the right decision. When we exit the station, we are surprised to see that there are no signs for where to go nor Olympic volunteers to tell us. We decide to follow the crowd, at least until we can call up Google maps and find that the crowd was, in fact, going in the right direction. We eventually see signs, but they seem to have been located to help people who have driven and parked in a parking lot, not to help people taking the metro.

Despite being old folks, we tend to walk faster than most people and we arrive at the security line about 2.5 hrs before the show starts. Because of all of the Olympic pins that Steve is wearing and the backpack which has his camera, going through security is so much fun - remove the hat, backpack, vest, iWatch and for a second Steve thought that they were going to ask for his coat also (they have the magnetometers cranked up for those requiring "special" screening). It takes a couple of minutes for him to put himself back together before the volunteers can scan our tickets. This gives the volunteers plenty of time to ask about the pins and for Steve to give away some.

Once past security, we still have over two hours and we decide that the best way to kill time is to stand in the food line which appears to be moving at glacier-like speed. While we are waiting, Beth strikes up a conversation with the two women behind us who turn out to be college students at Case Western Reserve who are spending a semester abroad, one in Florence and the other in Milan.  They only have a weekend to spend at their first Olympics and want to know all about our experiences. This line is moving so slowly that Beth is able to leave the line, get into the fairly long line for the lady's room, go through that line and find Steve almost still in the same spot!

We finally get to the front of the line and find that they have tomato and mozzarella calzones. We think that a nice warm calzone sounds good to warm us up before 4+ hrs in an outdoor stadium. Just like the other day, we place our order and then wait. We finally get our calzones, which are nice and warm, only to bite into them and find that the middle is cold. Bummer! But sustenance is sustenance and we eat them anyway.

Now it is time to figure out where our seats are, and we look for a sign. We see plenty of signs - one for the Olympic family entrance and one for the press entrance but nothing for spectators. Time to find a volunteer. The first says go to the green section. We don't see anything that indicates colors. The next says, keep going in the direction you are going. The third says the green section is around the corner. Finally, we find a Canadian volunteer who looks at his map and says that we are entering at the ground level (as opposed to one of the huge spiral stairs at the corners of the stadium) at door 18. We thought that it was weird that we would be entering the stadium at the ground level because we purchased C level seats and expected to be up in the nose-bleed seats at the top of the stadium There is also nothing on our ticket that says anything about door 18, but this was specific enough that we do what he says and find door 18. At the door, a woman gives us each a program and an LED light to wear on our wrists that will be part of the light show. From there, we find our way to our seats which are in the 11th row from the bottom on the opposite end of the stadium from a stage. Our section seems to be almost entirely Canadians and Americans, and we hear one of them say that because the Italians are not buying as many tickets as expected, the Opening Ceremonies did not sell out and everyone who bought their tickets early were moved down closer to the field so that the stands would look full on TV. This is fine with us!

At 7:15 PM, the warmup act comes on, but it is almost entirely in Italian, so we don't know what is going on. The only thing that we can figure out is that their job is to teach us the dance moves that go with the official Milano-Cortina 2026 song. The other thing that was interesting was that there was a woman doing sign-language on the big screens and would sort of dance to the music to convey the beat of the song when there were no lyrics.

We can't say that we understood everything in the Opening Ceremonies although it did include the many contributions of Italians to world culture. So rather than try to explain it, we'll just include some of the better pictures and then include some comments:

We generally liked the artistic program although there were times when we had no idea what was going on.  We especially liked the part where color was added to the black and white notes with the big- headed characters representing Italian composers Puccini, Roselli and Verde.

The parade of nations was a little disjointed being conducted in five different venues. Just a woman wearing white and carrying a sign with no one behind them was strange, although this was a logical outcome of having such a spread-out Olympic Games. There would have been no way to get the athletes from the other venues to Milan and back without affecting their game preparations, but it also would not have been fair to the athletes, most of whom marching in the parade of nations is the highlight of the Olympics, to have missed the Opening Ceremonies just because they happened to play the "wrong" sport.

Of the nations, Israel was definitely booed the most while Ukraine was clearly applauded the most. The United States had some boos, but it was mostly positive, except when Vice President Vance was shown on the big screen. The boos from Vance were mostly from the Canadian and US fans around us. When we thought about it, we realized that even in a country that is fairly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, the Olympic ideals of equality of all people and bringing the world together for peaceful competition is antithetical to MAGA so it is not likely that would get much love from either the Americans or anyone else.

We thought that new International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry from Zimbabwe did a great job in her first primetime speech as the first female IOC president. 

We wished that the lighting of the Olympic cauldron had been better. We are sure that it was spectacular if you happened to be at the Peace Arch, but watching on a big screen was just like watching it on TV except more expensive.  If you want to see more about what the Italians were trying to get across during the Opening Ceremony, check this out: https://www.olympics.com/en/milano-cortina-2026/ceremonies/the-olympic-opening-ceremony 

After the Ceremonies finished, they made an announcement asking people in our grandstand to wait for 20 minutes before departing. We decided that since it was already 12:30am and we had about an hour to get back to the hotel that we would go anyway. Once outside, we realized why they had made this announcement. Our way was blocked by security escorting the last of the Olympic athletes out of the stadium and on to their buses back to the Olympic Village.  When they finally let us go, the crush of people got close to dangerous levels. But once we got out of the stadium area, the walk back to the metro went smoothly. In fact, since we walk fast, we beat a lot of people back and the train we got on was full, but not overly so. The only problem was getting on an M4 metro train going in the wrong direction. But we only added one extra station. By the time we got back to the hotel and got settled into bed, it was about 2:15 AM. Tomorrow (long track speed skating) is going to be a long day!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day -1 (Milan)

February 5

Jetlag is strange. Despite being dead-to-the-world before 8 PM yesterday, we were completely awake at 2 AM and took several hours for us to get back to sleep and then, it was not really good sleep. It did not help that the temperature in the room was 25 C (~80 F). It appears that they only heat rooms in the winter, not cool, so we have to regulate the temperature by opening the window. We shower in a space capsule-sized shower and then head down to breakfast. It is a typical European layout - we have prosciutto and another ham-like meat, a choice of cheeses, way too many dolces (sweets) like chocolate pear or apple tarts, but also some fairly healthy stuff like yogurt and fresh fruit. 

After breakfast, Steve tackles his first job: getting his pin vest ready. He's got a black vest from Salt Lake City 2002 that will eventually be completely covered by Olympic pins to trade, but he has to work his way up to carrying that weight, so he decides to start with about 50 pins. He also has a hat from the Lillehammer 1994 Olympics with another 50 or so pins. He has learned that the metal pinbacks often don't hold well in lower temperatures, so all of these pins are held with rubber pinbacks. He has another 20 pins in his pocket to give away with the goal of getting rid of at least 10 per day so that he comes home with fewer pins than he left with.

The Olympics are so big now that all of the events don't fit into the official 16 days allotted for them, so even though the Opening Ceremonies are not until tomorrow night, we've got tickets today for women's ice hockey where Germany is going to play Sweden. The game isn't until 12:15 PM, but we haven't been on Milan's metro yet and we are unsure how long it will take to get to the stadium, so we leave around 10 AM.

Our hotel is on the southern edge of the city center, and we are going to the northwest corner, so we have to change lines twice to get there. But there are very few people on the metro after rush hour, and we get to our stop in about 45 minutes. On the metro, we meet a couple from northern Ohio who were admiring Steve's pins. They tell us that they had always wanted to attend the Olympics but were waiting to get their son through college and now hope to attend many of them. We wish them a good stay in Milan and head out of the metro.

Once outside, we see this:

This arena complex, which includes both the smaller of the two Milan 2026 ice hockey venues and the speed skating oval appears to be owned by the Italian power company. There is a display indicating how many megawatts of power their solar farms are generating. We wondered whether the decorative roof artwork, which extends in a straight line for about a mile, is part of the solar array, but we've never heard of transparent solar voltaic systems so maybe this really is just artwork.

At the beginning of every Olympics, we find the intersection where planning meets reality. In this case, we pass through security where Steve has to take off his vest, hat, backpack and fanny pack for inspection (all these pins set off metal detectors very well!). Then we continue walking for perhaps half a mile along a completely controlled area only to come to another security station where we have to do the same thing. We're not sure why they need a second one to screen people who have already been screened, but it is what it is.

Since we are way early to arrive, the previous game is still going and we have to wait in a pretty long line for the gates to open to let us in. While we are waiting, we see a couple of guys near us who are wearing RPI hats (RPI is the college we both attended). Beth decides to be bold and walks over to talk to them. They remind her that Nina Christhof, who is the Captain of RPI's women's hockey team was named to play for Team Germany so they are here to support her. We see an older couple ahead of us who are wearing matching Christhof hockey jerseys and we guess they might be her parents.

Once they let us in, we head directly to the concession stands to grab a light lunch before the game starts. Steve picks a prosciutto and cheese ciabatta sandwich, and Beth has a spec (another sort of ham) and provolone cheese sandwich. The guy taking our orders tells us to wait at the side of the concession stand. We think that since the sign says hot and cold sandwiches, that they intend for these to be heated. While we are waiting, we engage in the kind of conversations that we always seem to have at the Olympics. We meet three Italian guys who don't speak much English, but we make out that they are grandfather, son and grandson. The grandfather understands a little English and the grandson can speak a little English. They ask us about where we are from, how long we are staying in Italy and why is Steve wearing all of these pins. Steve tells them that pins is the sport of the spectator and hands the grandson a pin. He thanks Steve very much and then decides that his grandfather, who shares the same first name, should get the pin. Steve gives the grandson another one. Then they wish us buono giorno (good day) and head off. Several minutes later, we finally get our sandwiches and find that if they were ever warm, they certainly aren't now. It was unclear whether they intended that or that some guy in the back was making each sandwich one at a time instead of handing out premade ones.

We find our way to our seats and find that we are sitting next to the couple from Ohio! This is not too surprising as ticket allocations to other countries are typically in blocks although we did not expect it now that all Olympic ticketing is run through the host country. We had expected that Sweden would stomp on Germany, but Germany surprises us by scoring first and midway through the game, it was tied 1-1. Sweden does finally take over and wins 4-1, but it was a good game.  Here are some of Steve's pictures:

We walk back to the metro with the goal of finding an electronic store that our hotel desk person told us might have a power connector for an HP laptop that Steve forgot to pack. It has the advantage of being one station away from the Duomo. When we get on the metro, we again end up running into the couple from Ohio, who kid us that we much be following them. This time, Steve remembers that his goal is to give away pins and hands them a couple to start their collection. A couple of minutes later, a woman comes up and asks Steve if he would like to trade. She apologizes that all she has are pins from Albertville 1992. No problem, she finds a hockey pin from Vancouver and Steve takes a curling pin. Then Steve turns to the couple from Ohio and says that this is why he is wearing all of these pins. Their station is before ours and as they leave, we tell them kiddingly that we will see them tomorrow!

The hotel's directions to the electronics store, which is in the metro station, were very good. We find a person that works there, ask if he speaks English (he does!) and Steve tells him what he needs. He says that he thinks that he has something that works, but if not to save the box and the receipt and he can bring it back for a refund.

That chore taken care of, we head outside. There is an Olympic merchandise store right there, but we know that the Olympic Superstore is next to the Duomo so we decide to go there. We know that we are close, but don't know which direction to go and the buildings in this area are too tall to see anything. This also makes it hard for Google maps to figure out where we are because it can't get see enough satellites. But we get a rough idea of the direction and head off. It looks like we are walking along what the organizing committee calls the Olympic Boulevard because we see this:

The pictograms above the street must look really great at night! There are barricades up all along the street and we learn later that the Olympic torch relay will pass along here tonight. A little more walking and we find the Piazza al Duomo which is right across the street from both the Olympic Superstore and the famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuelle II (named after the 1st king of unified Italy) shopping plaza:

The line to the Superstore looks long, but it moves fairly fast. Many people are admiring Steve's pins and he gives some away to an enthusiastic group of women wearing Team Netherlands outfits. It turns out that they all work at Dutch House, one of the many Team houses set up around the city part to stimulate tourism, part to give the athlete's families and supporters a place to celebrate all of their team victories. We find that Dutch House is quite close to our hotel and make a point of visiting sometime while we are in Milan. The Superstore itself is underwhelming. Our son Sean collects Olympic mascot plushies, but there are no Tina mascots (Tina, short for Cortina is a Sloat, a type of weasel), no Olympic pins and no long sleeve shirts. We are hoping that this is just a short-term stocking problem and not that they are already out of merchandise before the Games even start!

Back outside, we hear an announcement that the Duomo station and the station that we got off at will both be closed at 5 PM due to the torch relay. The area around the Duomo station is really crowded so we decide to walk back to the other station. This is a little more complicated than Steve had thought (we just need to go down one more block and turn right) because none of the streets in Milan are straight or approach each other at right angles. We finally end up making a sort of U turn around the Galleria and back onto the Olympic Boulevard close to where we originally got onto it. From there it is only a short walk and one stop on the metro to our hotel.

We are both getting pretty tired, so we decide to drop our stuff at the hotel and head back out for a quick light meal. This is actually the only choice because Italians typically don't eat dinner until 7-8 PM and a lot of the restaurants are not even open before 7 PM. We find a place where we can get a cocktail and "snacks" for one price called an Apperitivo. It is typically served in bars, and you are paying for the drinks, not the food. Beth has a limoncello spritz and Steve has red wine. Along with the drinks come with bite sized pieces of different flavors of pizza.

We end up the day with, of course, more gelato. The street in front of the gelateria we had chosen for tonight was very crowded with lots of police and Steve suspected that we were along the Olympic torch route for the evening as it headed toward the Duomo. Sure enough, while we were ordering our gelato, the torch went by! The perfect end for a very good day. We are happing to just go back to the hotel and go to sleep.

Tomorrow, we have the Opening Ceremonies in the evening so the blog will probably not arrive until the following day. Enjoy!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day -3,-2 (Cupertino to Milan)

 February 3-4

This will have to be a quick post at the end of two really short days crammed together to make what feels like one really long day. Our alarm went off at 4 AM and gave us just enough time to take quick showers, pack our toiletries and get picked up by our Uber to San Francisco International. Bay Area traffic is funny. We knew we would be way early to the airport, but if we had waited another hour, we would have arrived two hours later. But this was okay. It gave the TSA workers plenty of time to examine the 700+ Olympic lapel pins that Steve is bringing (with the goal of giving at least 10 away per day).

Other than some pretty severe turbulence going over the Rocky Mountains, the flight from San Francisco to Montreal was uneventful. We had a 3 hr layover which gave us time to grab a light meal before we boarded our flight to Milano. As soon as we saw the plane, we knew that this going to be interesting:

It seemed likely that a plane with the Canadian Olympic Association logo on it was going to have some Olympic athletes on board. Sure enough, they started arriving shortly after we sat down. Although we have watched a lot of speed skating (both short- and long-track) and bobsleigh, we didn’t recognize anyone. Many had ski boots and we guessed that they might be freestyle skiers. We also saw the only member of the Jamaican alpine skiing team (all the other Jamaican Olympians are bobsledders) and forty Canadian athletes (the announced number- we think that’s a lot but nearly the entire men’s and women’s Italian hockey team are based in Canada)  who will be representing Italy in Milano-Cortina. Several people noticed the pins on Steve’s hat, a few took pictures and one guy, who is the coach of the sole Eritrean alpine skier, gave Steve one of their team pins!

Before boarding, the gate agents announced that as one of Team Canada’s official sponsors, they were thrilled to be transporting a number of Olympic athletes and coaches and invited them to board ahead of everyone else. The crowd gave them an enthusiastic cheer.

As we boarded, what had been light flurries turned to heavier snow and we could tell that our plane was going to take a tour of the de-icing station before we took off:

While we were waiting, we found ourselves sitting behind a Canadian woman who was carrying her Team Italy hockey jersey. There were also a group of people next to us that seemed to be families of athletes.

The flight itself was uneventful. Neither of us slept more than an hour or two as we flew over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on this side of the Atlantic and Cork in Ireland and Land’s End in England on the other side. We continued down across Brittany and across France, over the Alps near Geneva and down into a very rainy Italy.

Milano’s main airport is called Malpensa which my Duolingo Italian says could reasonably be translated as “bad idea”. If so, it could be considered a bad idea for being so far from the city. After clearing customs and getting our bags, we take a 45 min train ride to the Milano Centrale station. Here is a picture of some of the art in this old time station:

Check-in at our hotel isn’t until 2 PM so we stop in the train station for lunch (panini sandwiches and some badly needed caffeine - Coke Zero) before getting an Uber to the hotel.

The hotel is a boutique hotel in a neighborhood called Navigli somewhat to the southwest of the city center. We are still working on figuring out how many rooms there are (less than 30 seems likely).

When we unpack, Steve realizes he is missing the charging cable for his laptop so he is writing this on his phone. We’ll have to do something about this when it is not raining and we are less sleep deprived. But for now, we spent some time walking around the area, finding the Metro station nearest us and buying 3 day passes (the longest time they will sell), and end up having gelato for dinner!

Tomorrow, we are off to Women’s Ice Hockey. Stay tuned!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day -7 (Cupertino)

 January 30th

My name is Steve and I'm an Olympiholic. While that sounds like I should be in some sort of 12-step program, I have nothing but positive things to say about my Olympic obsession and have no interest in giving it up. The 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Milano-Cortina will be the 15th Olympic Games that my wife Beth and I have attended, beginning (gulp)46 years ago at the Lake Place 1980 Winter Olympics.

If you are new to these blogs, welcome! If you have read my previous Olympic (or other) blogs, welcome back. I will try not to be redundant. Either way, my goal with these blogs is to give you an idea of what it is like to be an Olympic spectator. We are now four days out from our departure for Milano, so I thought I would take some time to give you an idea of the planning that has gone into getting us where we are now. Our past experience always involves the same steps in the same order: buy tickets, buy plane and other transportation tickets, find other things to do in the host city, and finally, find a place to stay. Let's take those steps one at a time.

In November 2024, we signed up on the Milano-Cortina 2026 website for a drawing for having the first chance at buying tickets. In January 2025, we received an email from the organizing committee telling us that we would get an email between February 5 and February 20 telling us when our timeslot would be to initially buy tickets. There would be many more opportunities to buy tickets as time went on, but we were hoping for one of the earlier time slots in order to have more choices. We eventually got an email indicating that our time slot would start at 10 AM central European time on February 7th and last for 48 hours. 10 AM central European time is 1 AM here in California so that wasn't very convenient, but I'm an Olympiholic, so I woke up to be one of the first in line. Despite that, there was still a 25-minute queue to get into the ticketing website. The rules are that one person can only purchase 30 tickets in order to prevent ticketing resellers from buying up all of the prime tickets, so Beth also created an account that I used to log in about a week later to buy more tickets.

There were surprisingly few tickets to marquee events like Women's figure skating, but Beth and I are pretty non-denominational when it comes to what events we see. Over the years, we've had great times at almost any events we've gone to no matter what the sport. Over the course of the next six months, we purchased tickets to 17 events:

    February 5 - Women's Ice Hockey France vs Japan
    February 6 - Opening Ceremonies
    February 7 - Women's 3000m speed skating
    February 8 - Women's Ice Hockey France vs Sweden
    February 10 - Women's 500m, Men's 1000m & mixed relay short track speed skating
    February 11 - Men's Ice Hockey Slovakia vs Finland
    February 12 - Men's Ice Hockey Czechia vs Canada
    February 13 - Men's Ice Hockey Italy vs Slovakia
    February 14 - Women's Skeleton Heats 3 and 4
    February 15 - Women's Monobob Heats 1 and 2
    February 16 - Women's Curling Round Robin
    February 16 - Men's Curling Round Robin
    February 17 - Women's Curling Round Robin
    February 18 - Men's Curling Round Robin
    February 19 - Men's Curling Semi Finals
    February 20 - Women's Two-Women Bobsled Heats 1 and 2
    February 21 - Women's 12.5 Km Biathlon Mass Start

Note that we didn't know who would be playing in the ice hockey games when we bought the tickets. It was just the luck of the draw. We also discovered that we had accidentally purchased two sets of Curling tickets that overlapped with the Monobob event, but we were able to sell these tickets at face value on the resale site that the organizing committee operates. For the most part, we have tried to limit our tickets to one event per day so that we have plenty of time for sightseeing. But it does not appear that the Italian people are buying up tickets at the rate that was projected and we believe that we will have plenty of options to buy additional event tickets once we are in Italy if we choose to.

With tickets out of the way, it was time to work on transportation. We can't fly directly from San Francisco to Milano, so we have to change planes in places like London or Rome. San Francisco to London is 11 hr, 14 min while San Francisco to Rome is 12 hr, 10 min. This was a little too long to spend stuck in a typically cramped economy-class seat, so we decided to split the trip in half by going from San Francisco to Montreal in the morning, having dinner during our layover and then flying directly to Milano, arriving there in the morning of the following day.

Milano-Cortina will be one of the most spread out Olympic games ever! We had taken a look at in-country transportation and found that it is a royal pain to get from Milano to Cortina. It is only 160 miles between the two as the crow flies, but as in the old Maine joke, "you can't get there from here".  It is 255 miles to drive and an almost 4 hr trip by high-speed train to Venice and low-speed train to Ponte nelle Alpi-Polpet followed by a 30-ish minute bus ride to Cortina. There was just no way that we would want to stay in Milano and do this twice in a day to see any of the events in Cortina. Since there are events near Cortina that we really want to see (Bobsled, Skeleton, Curling, Biathlon) we decided that we would break our trip into two parts - Feb 4-14 in Milano and Feb 14-22 in Cortina. Finally, since Venice is quite close to Cortina, we decided to spend a 3-day "weekend" in Venice after the Games are over. The airline options from Venice are more limited so we can't break up the long flight and will instead fly Venice to London and then have a long flight from London to San Francisco. Since we are traveling in the same direction as the sun, we leave Venice around 11 AM and arrive in San Francisco at about 6 PM of the same day. With the logistics decided, we booked our flights about six months ago and our train tickets about 2 months ago.

We have clear divisions of labor while working on planning. I work on event tickets and some of the transportation tickets while Beth works on housing and finding interesting non-event things for us to do. For Milano, the things that require tickets are seeing Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and a tour of the Duomo - the huge gothic cathedral in the center of Milano. Beth also has a long list of other things to do in case we have time, such as an exhibition on 3,000 years of the Olympics, that don't require advanced ticketing. At the same time, she made reservations for the two places in Venice that require advanced ticketing: the Doge Palace and St. Mark's basilica. About the only thing that requires advanced tickets in Cortina is a ride up the Gondola which we have, so far, decided to pass on.

Finally, it was time to deal with housing. Throughout our Olympic adventures there has been a pattern to housing. A couple of years out, the Olympic family (International Olympic Committee, the National Olympic Committees, sports federations, broadcast media and families of potential Olympic athletes) reserve all the hotel rooms in the city and there is no availability for the rest of us. Of course, if you have stupid amounts of money, it is always possible to reserve rooms at multi-thousands of dollars per night. Seeing the high housing costs, every Airbnb host jacks up their prices in the hopes of paying a year's worth of mortgage in a few weeks. So, we wait. Eventually, all of the Olympic family people start to sort out how many rooms they actually need and begin cancelling their reservations. Hotels, which thought that they were completely booked out are now half full and cut their prices. Those price cuts trigger corresponding cuts from the Airbnb people and the whole thing becomes a game of chicken where the longer you wait, the less you pay. This process has happened at every Olympics we've gone to - until now. The first problem was Cortina. The population of Cortina is only about 7,000 in the summer and 40,000 in the winter so there aren't too many hotels or Airbnb's. Two months before the Games, there were still very few rooms and hotel prices were all multi-thousands of dollars per night. We could have found cheaper housing by booking a hotel in one of the many small towns between Cortina and the Ponte nelle Alpi-Polpet train station, but that would have meant spending unknown hours per day on buses going from the hotel to the Olympic venues - something we really wanted to avoid if we could. We finally settled on an Airbnb in Cortina that is a studio apartment with a sofa bed for a mere $500/night. By far, the most we have ever paid for Olympic housing! But the upside is that we are within walking distance of both the sliding center (skeleton, bobsled) and curling stadium. Booking a hotel in Venice was no problem as it is the off season there and we found a nice place right near the grand canal. This left us to deal with Milano. We watched hotel prices literally for months. There was plenty of availability, but prices remained stubbornly high. I really wonder if the hotels are using some sort of AI to set prices instead of panicking when they have a bunch of rooms become available. In any case, we waited until about three weeks before we were scheduled to leave to book a nice hotel in the Navigli neighborhood of Milano, to the southwest of the Duomo, for a little over $300/night - at least it comes with a free breakfast and is a short walk from the nearest subway station!

With preparations out of the way, we can spend our last couple of days at home focusing on the really important stuff like setting up our video system to record all of the many, many Olympic events we will miss while we are gone, and figuring out how to bring enough clothes to be comfortable from sub-zero to 50F in rain/snow and everything in-between without bringing such large suitcases that they are a pain to schlep on taxis, buses, trains and perhaps water taxis. We'll check back in on Tuesday (February 4th) as we set out on this adventure. Stay tuned!

Indochina Express - Day 23 (Bangkok to Cupertino)

March 25

After 23 days, it is time to head home. We enjoy one more breakfast on the river and then Yokie and our driver pick us up for the ride to the airport. It is only mid-day in Bangkok, so traffic is not very heavy, and we get to the airport with a lot of time to spare. We get one more picture with Yokie:

and then head through security. We have plenty of time to do some shopping and get rid of some of our remaining Thai money. We don't see any stores that sell Thai art that we could fit in our carry-on bags, but we do visit a store selling gold jewelry. I'm lucky to get Beth (who never spends anything on herself) to buy a pair of nice gold earrings because she didn't do the Bhat to Dollar calculation correctly and thought that they cost much less than they actually did! We also buy a couple of bags of cashew nuts as Thailand is one of the biggest producers of these nuts and the cost is much lower than we can get at home.

Finally, we all board our flight to Taipei, Taiwan where Chris and Mark will connect with a flight to Toronto while we head on to San Francisco. Since we lost a day going west, now we get it back. Beth and I will arrive in San Francisco only four hours after we leave Bangkok even though we will spend nearly 16 hours in transit. The good news is that traveling east, we will have a tail wind for most of our trip which will cut our travel time by perhaps two hours compared with going west.

The first flight lands in Taipei in the late afternoon. One of the advantages of flying business class is that we get to kill time in the "VIP" lounge. We have some dim sum and caffeine and think about our strategy of when to sleep on our flights to minimize jet lag. Finally, it is time for Chris and Mark to board their flight, and we walk with them to their gate. One of the interesting things about the Taipei airport is that the international terminal gates are on two levels: you show your boarding passes/passports on the upper level and then board the flight from the lower level. Each of the upper gates has a theme. Chris and Mark's gate looks like a city park with trees and park benches to sit at while waiting. We say goodbye and ask them to think about where in the world they would like to go next and then head off to our gate which is laid out like a lunch place outside a train station.

Once on the plane and in the air, of course they feed us, which gives us something to do for an hour or so. My vaguely Chinese dinner looks better than it tastes (maybe I've adapted to the spicy food we've eaten during our trip). After dinner, I decide to go with the "do what you would do in the time zone that you are traveling to" strategy while Beth decides that she is not tired and will just stay awake reading the whole flight. Since it is now very early morning in California, I try to go to sleep. But after a couple of hours of unsuccessfully trying to get to sleep, I decide to read a while, watch where we are on the globe for a while, and play some of the games on the video display for a while. We arrive in San Francisco a little early and Uber home. It has been a great trip!

To everyone who has been reading this blog, I hope that you have enjoyed it. We strongly recommend travel to this part of the world! I'm sorry that it has taken a month after we returned home to complete it, but I had over a thousand photos that needed editing. If there are things that I could have done better, please leave me a comment and I will try to incorporate them into future blogs. Speaking of which, my next blog will probably be for our trip to Milan and Cortina, Italy for the Winter Olympics in February 2026. I hope that you will join us for this adventure!