Trying to get to Italy

 I’ve tried to blog since July but have gotten further and further behind. The muse just hasn’t been there. I’ll maybe get back to our grandkids trip and house hunting after we are back from this trip. But for now, we are in Italy, running amok!

This trip started when we decided to attend the opera for Dale’s birthday. I then found operas for the day before and the day after his birthday that were going to be wonderful, so there the trip goes. I also wanted photos from Palatine Hill, something I didn’t get to last year, so added in Rome, but it is a good place to fly in and out of anyway.

We started out, like most trips, with airplane flights. We decided to travel lighter this trip, with our 2 international size, carry-on, roller bags. Dale with a back pack and me with my Patagonia over the shoulder bag. We also had a standard size carry-on roller bag that we checked.

I was able to pack many clothing items in our small international size bags, 1 extra pair of shoes for me, some books and magazines, and coffee makings. We brought our down sweaters and rain jackets in the backpack and my camera and our laptops in the Patagonia.

Checked were our opera clothes, Dale’s button-up, short-sleeve shirts and toiletries. My tripod was also in the bag.

We didn’t know where we’d be located by this trip so we decided to fly in and out of Bakersfield. 5:20 AM and we were off.

We had a stop in Denver which was uneventful, then onto Boston, which was eventful. We landed just as a thunderstorm was moving into the area. By the time we got close to the gate, lightening was all around us and the plane rocked in the wind. We could not travel any further as the storm would put the gate people in harms way so we had to sit on the tarmac for 1-1/2 hrs.

The plane was safe during the storm, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that we only had 1 hour in Boston before our next flight, to Frankfurt, then 1 hour to our next flight into Rome. So now we were missing our flights.

In Boston, once inside the terminal, everything was chaos. Flights were trying to get off the ground, trying to unload and load, people everywhere. I checked with the desk and was told to just get to Frankfurt where we would be told what our next flights would be.

We found our flight to Frankfurt and got right onto the plane. We were not able to get assigned seats until just before leaving Bakersfield as this was a foreign airline, so our seats were way in the back. We didn’t care as we were able to sit together and we’d be sleeping most of the way.

As it turned out there was no gluten free meals being given out and I couldn’t order one before the flight. The flight attendants found extra salads, fruit dishes and cheese for me. I had some crackers and bars so I knew I’d be fine.

Food, as found by the attendants. 

We got to Frankfurt where we were told that we were rerouted to Brussels then Rome so I went to the Customer Service to see if there was any way to go straight to Rome. There were no direct flights available because of all of the delays. But we did get free meals for all of our troubles. We went directly to a place we’d found last year with gluten free sausages, sauerkraut and drinks.

Sausage and wine

We finally got into Rome in the late afternoon but our checked bag didn’t come. We went to file a claim but Lufthansa said it wasn’t their flight. Brussels Airlines said it wasn’t their flight but after showing all of our boarding passes, they finally agreed that it was theirs. We filed a claim without any hope of getting our bag while on this trip.

After catching a taxi to our Apartment, I then couldn’t get the internet on my phone to work. This meant we couldn’t get the instructions to get into our Airbnb apt. We walked down the hill to a little hotel who gave us their internet, then had us use their phone to call the apartment owner. One of the women, then showed us a restaurant across the street that had almost entirely gluten free menu.

We got into apartment, dropped our bags, went to the restaurant and they said to come back in 20 min. In the meantime, we walked around the corner to a wine bar, tasted wine, bought a bottle and came back to the restaurant where they had reserved a table outside for us. We were starving but everything was safe for me to eat and we were going to be fine!

Gluten free pizza and pasta