A trip to Italy

Visiting my favourite survey company in Italy, Te.Ma. in Faenza. Unfortunately for me Ryan Air has not opened up the route to Bologna Forli yet from Birmingham, although this was announced yesterday as coming in the spring. So I had the awful trawl up to Stansted airport along the very scary A14, far too many trucks to be safe. Although the route was clear today and made good time, Stafford to Stansted in 2.5 hours, this journey is reported as 2.75 hours on Multimap. Has anybody received speed ticket yet for claims made on their blog?
Anyway Stansted was quite quiet for once so none of the horrendous queues getting through security. Ryan Air ran on time as well, I stepped off the plane exactly at the time advertised, but that the beauty of not flying from Heathrow where nothing ever runs to time!
Coming to Italy is allowing me to test out my new Skype cell phone from '3'. I am trying '3' out against my current service provider, Vodaphone, to see how they do, but also to see how well Skype works on a cell phone. Pretty good so far! I have a £12 monthly contract with 100 anytime minutes, so I make calls in UK on my Vodaphone phone to make use of the more generous free minutes. Also my main cell phone number is re-directed to the '3' number as this also uses up the free minutes on Vodaphone. This should work out well in Italy as if I stay on the local '3' network, the charges work out alot better than Vodaphone Passport, reducing those vital in country mobile costs. I have also got the advantage of there being a '3' network out here so the Skype facility works on the mobile. Skype on '3' works out fairly well, though at present it does not offer a SkypeOut service. The Skype phone is not too bad either, though being a 3G phone it is too easy to get into services you don't want to use at the press of a button, because the buttons seemed to be redefined with each press. I find this very frustrating and have gone back to a very basic phone for my main cell phone, you can only ring a number and talk on it! but apparently nowadays people don't use their cell phones to talk, they are full multi-media play things with camera and videos.
Lets hope the sidescan work goes as well as the journey and comunications. Unfortunately it looks like the weather is going to blow it out, so I will only get to do desk mobilisation and testing of equipment and define survey strategies, as I have to be back in the UK on Mondayfor a job in Great Yarmouth.