Milan has two airports, Linate and Malpensa. Malpensa is very far away outside of Milan and it last 45 Minutes to go there by train. Linate instead can easily reached by car or bus. During the funny and interesting evening with the Italian MVPs at the Kapuziner I find out that everybody except me was departing from Linate.

So I leave Milan on a typical Italian sunny day to go to Malpensa Airport.

I was sitting around and waiting for the boarding, when I noticed a group which seems quite familiar.

It were the italian MVPs, a little bit angry

The radar at Linate airport was broken and no flight could depart or arrive. So everybody hurry to get the plane, MY Plane from Malpensa. The flight was completely full but this wasn’t too dramatically. We arrived at London Heathrow terminal 5 with 20 minutes delay and 1h transit time.

After many problems like a shuttle bus that was not coming for 15 minutes and the fastest striptease in the security gate we finally arrived at Gate 1b. To hear a nice voice telling us: “Dear travelers we have to inform you that your flight Seattle will depart at 16:20 instead of 15:00”

After all we leave London at 17:00. But who cares, we are going to Seattle to the Microsoft MVP Summit. I’m really excited!

My USA trip starts at Milan, Italy. What a strange feeling waking up this morning. It is the first time that I’m going so far away. There was a pre-summit MVP dinner at the Kapuziner, a German restaurant here at Milan yesterday evening. It was the first time that I met the Italian MVPs. Even if I’m living in Italy my MVP Lead is Germany cause all my online stuff is in German. We were 9 people 3 non-MPVs (two of them Microsoft employees) and 6 MVPs. I’m going to tell you more about them when I’m going to meet them again on the plane from London Heathrow to Seattle, USA.

Lesson 1 & 2

1. You have to bring a camera wherever you go. All the people in the restaurant wear the same clothes like the people in Bavaria.
2. Always ask for Blogs or websites. How can you mention somebody in the IT without linking is name to his website.

With 36h of autonomy and enough storage capacity to save 2 Weeks of GPS Date, the GPS Logger DF-100 by GlobalSat is the perfect device to track our journey along the west coast.

The Data Logger PC Utility is not very user friendly but after some testing you can handle it.

First at all you have to select the Data you want to export from the device.

Than you can vie the track point on Google Earth or Google Maps directly

or export them in different GPS Formats to import them elsewhere

And import it everywhere else

And add the map to your blogpost

View Larger Map

The most important thing you need to blog is a computer. I use a Lenovo Thinkpad Z61p.

Thanks to the supplemental battery I have 6h of autonomy. Enough time to blog everywhere.