Rome to Home, August 7, 2024

Last updated on September 18th, 2024 at 02:49 pm

[This is a rough draft to get started. We’ve done a lot of traveling so far, and are behind in sleep, so we’ll keep this updated as we have a chance. When this isn’t here anymore, you’ll know that we’re finished with the page!]

We ate breakfast from our silver tray in our hotel room. The front desk attendant helped us get our luggage into the tiny elevator and out to the front of the hotel. We waited just a few minutes for our private prearranged car transfer to the airport. The driver was on time and the van was nice with plenty of room for us and our luggage. The drive to the airport was about 30 minutes.

We were directed with all the other people waiting through the same line to go to the kiosk to print luggage tags. Once we obtained the tags for our luggage, we were directed to an even longer line to drop off the bags.  We waited about an hour in this line. While in line we were offered $1000 each, a hotel and some meals and some miles to delay our return flight to the next day.  While a little tempting, we turned it down. Rome has been very hot, and we’re ready to be home!

Lines for custom control as well as security check were long. Joyce was a little surprised at the number of times the Italian airport staff needed to see our passports. She could understand if we were entering the country, but didn’t understand their interest as we were leaving.   At any rate, after a lot of standing we arrived at the gate about 10 minutes before boarding. Joyce’s carry-on was deemed too large, for a carry-on though that piece of luggage as been in many similar sized planes on this same airline in the past. Joyce kept most of her grumbling inside and checked it at the gate.

The flight to Charlotte was about 10 hours. We were seated in the last row if a section of economy. The good news was the bathroom was directly behind us. The bad news was our seats couldn’t recline but the seats in front of us could, so Joyce spend a lot of the flight feeling like the person seated in front of her was in her lap. The lady seated beside Joyce, told the person in front of her “No” when he tried to recline his seat and he stopped. Maybe Joyce should have tried that. There was some turbulence the last hour to get over/around the hurricane, but not too bad.

We waited quite a while for all the bags to arrive in baggage claim, but thankfully, they all arrived. We waited in long Disney-like mazes for customs. Once we got to the agent, she send us through with barely a look at our passports and no questions. Then we had a long walk through the airport to go through security, since we had arrived for overseas. Everyone went through one line again. More Disney-like mazes. We finally got to the gate about 1 1/2 hours after landing, with still plenty of time to make an

8:30 boarding to Indianapolis. We had a little scare when it looked like where we were waiting was not the correct gate, but signage was quickly corrected and we were in the correct place. Joyce doesn’t remember much about the flight to Indianapolis as she slept through most of it. She sort of woke up once to shake her head when Alan asked her if she wanted anything to drink.

Brian picked us up when we landed and after a very brief visit with he and Beth, we were on our way home. We made it home without incident to an unhappy cat that followed us everywhere for about a day expressing his displeasure at being left behind for so long with loud plaintive meows. (We heard from the cat sitter that he didn’t come out to see her during the entire time we were gone. Silly cat!)