However... the actual GETTING there part often sucks. Flights get delayed, airplane food sucks, someone throws up next to you or the bathrooms smell bad. It's just a pain. My dad always said he would work on building us a teleporter, you know, out of Star Trek. Alas, that was one project he couldn't complete and we are stuck traveling the old fashioned way.
Mom and Sissy left last Friday (June 8) from the Rome airport to head home. We dropped them and the rental car off about 9:30 that morning for their 1:00ish flight. Then we didn't hear from them for a few days.
These are their reports from the field:
Mom:
"We're finally home. We arrived at PDX at 4:12 on Saturday morning. ETA had been 10:30 Friday night. We spent 24 hours in airport lines, planes, JFK floor, JFK tarmac and finally in the air.The line at Rome was longgggg but we had time to get a panini at the autogrill before our flight. Little did we know that we'd get 2 meals and snacks on the flight. I think they feed you to keep you quiet. Had a great flight actually getting in 1/2 early to JFK. Flight was only half full so everyone got to spread out. Oh, we both got searched before we boarded the plane.Had to wait 45 minutes for a gate so we really hustled through the gates and customs only to get to the terminal and find that all flights were delayed due to weather. There were thunderstorms from Wisconsin down but the real problem was FAA computers had crashed earlier in the day. 4 gate changes - including back to one twice and we got on the plane at about 9:30 pm NY time rather than 6:30. No problem, just a short delay. We then sat on the tarmac for 3+ hours leaving sometime around 1 a.m. Got to "watch" a movie on the tarmac and tour the various runways and we both got some sleep. (Movie unfortunately was one that also played on the flight from Rome)."
Sissy:
"Our Rome to New York flight went smoothly. When we landed in New York visiblity was down to 3/4 of a mile. We cleared customs very quickly and found our gate where our plane was to take off at 6:35 pm EST. That's when the fun began. The flight departing from that gate to Atlanta had been delayed. We then found out that our flight was delayed until 8pm, then 8:44pm, then a gate change taking us from one end of the terminal to the other, then when we arrived at our new gate they knew nothing about our flight. Then they finally annouced another delay where we were to board at 9:14pm. Then we started the boarding process and everyone was very excited at this point. During all of this we learned 2 things that were causing these delays. The first was the FAA computers had gone down in Atlanta and caused a ripple effect of flights being canceled. There was also bad weather from the great lakes south to the gulf of mexico. So we boarded and thought we would be in the air shortly. That was definitely not the case, we spent the next 4 hours sitting on the runway and took off at 1:30am EST. We got to PDX at about 4am PST and was home just after 5am."
It turns out that they did indeed make it home, eventually. And we're still here in Italy. I know that we all had a few concerns about traveling together (I'm sure Peter must have wondered whether he was insane to travel with his wife, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law). And in the end? It went swimmingly. We worked out a system, we managed the crazy freeways, and saw some amazing parts of Italy. And we all took our first vacation in years. I think the consensus is that we'd even travel together again sometime! Hows that for sucess!
