Tuesday, 6/18

Excitement, or was it nervousness, filled the air as we packed our final bags and prepared to depart for Rome this morning.  Greg’s mom, Sue, had kindly agreed to pick up my mom (they live five minutes apart) and come gather Greg and I to drive us to the airport.  When Sue arrived on my doorstep with my mother, Joyce, in tow, my mom had a deer-in-the-headlights sort of look on her face.  “She’s nervous” Sue explained.  Thus followed a conversation explaining that my mom and I both have a hard time determining if we are excited or nervous as the emotions are very similar for us.  I myself had vacillated between fretting and bouncing around full of joy all morning.  We check our lists one final time and were whisked off to the airport, where our wait began.

Air travel is one of those experiences you tolerate to get to the end result.  Many moms have told me that childbirth is like this.  I cannot confirm this theory.  I equate the experience more to going to the dentist.  This is something you endure every so often so that you can have a shiny happy smile at the end of the ordeal.  In the interim you are crammed into an uncomfortable industrial chair, you suffer through people getting up in your personal space, it is difficult to breath, the items placed in your mouth are rather unpleasant, and then there is the physical discomfort.  The same can be said for our flight to Rome.  But rather than the brief thirty minutes I usually spend in the dentist’s chair, our flight lasted almost twelve lovely hours!  Of course we know it will be well worth it when we arrive in the beautiful ancient city and begin our adventures. 

Once on board Alitalia’s flight, which was delayed by one hour (on our last trip to Italy buses, trains, etc. all ran on Italian time, which is pretty much when they feel like it), we were reminded of how narrow the rows are and how snug the seats.  Once herded into narrow stalls with strangers, we were reassured of the camaraderie of hardship and the commonality of the human experience. Fellow travelers always surprise us with kindness.  The gentleman sitting next to me on the aisle, though he spoke little English was happy to trade seats with my mother, sitting across the aisle, so we could all sit together.  The man in front of us was fidgety and often bucked around in his seat distracting us from the likelihood of sleep but he made apologies by way of sharing his dark chocolate.  The other American tourists sitting behind us were happy to help us try to fix the movie on our screens, though “non funziona,” and “You just have to wait... maybe in an hour,” was the reassuring phrases the flight attendants used for their mantra when a passenger’s seat light failed to work, or the movie features refused to play.  And it was true, all through the seemingly eternal flight, we just had to wait for it to be over, watching silent movies between the seats ahead of us while our screens remained blank.  Dinner would no doubt be a diversion. Airplane food is rarely thrilling.  The best we could say about the pasta was that our culinary experiences could only improve from this point on in the trip. Of course, the hours of sitting cramped our lower backs, stiffened our necks, and wore on our nerves.  Yet,  in the end, we could not complain.  What are you paying for when you buy economy seats on a transcontinental voyage?  You are paying for this giant machine to magically float over land and ocean to get you to your destination.  We couldn’t be too grumpy as long as the flight was relatively smooth and got us to where we were going in one piece. Which of course it did, as you are reading this message we posted on arrival (That is, once we got an internet connection, because of course the Wi-Fi in our apartment was “non funziona” as well. We had to wait.)  Stay tuned to hear about our first day in Rome, more to report after pizza and a nap!