leaving a wonderful conference and getting home again ...

pgday.it in Prato was a truly marvelous conference, but everything is eventually coming to an end and so did this conference. On sunday Gabriele and Andrea took us one a tour through Florence ending in a great dinner and a bit of a challenge to catch the last train^bus back to prato ...

Today we started at around 09:30 in the morning trying to get Magnus to the airport which turned into quite a long trip mostly due to the fact that andreas navigation system developed something that can only be described as "artificial (un)intelligence".

After we left the airport we thought we were good for going back up to Salzburg (and Munch) but the navigation system acted up again and caused so much confusion that we actually managed to get up the highway WITHOUT(!) getting a ticket from the toll station.
So just imagine what it might take to get off a highway with a fully automated toll collection system without a ticket and neither the remote assistance nor the one lone guy that was responsible for some 18+ exit gateways and not even they guy in the main office is capable of understanding a single word of german or english ...

After a somewhat interesting discussion which mainly consisted of well wild gestures and "i have no idea what you are talking about" faces we managed to get a form that probably claims (again all Italian) that we turned around on the highway or something like that - but well it seems we don't have to pay anything for "hacking" the italian highway system.

On the way back to the car from the autostrada office we met the guy manning the 18+ toll houses again telling us that there is a completely unlabeled underground crossing to the other side of the highway which would have been a good thing to to know earlier for well "making crossing a highway "easier".