The morning started off well enough. We got up early to give ourselves plenty of time to get our stuff packed up and make it to the train station, then the airport. We caught the Leonardo Express train to the airport, but it was delayed more than 10 minutes. It wasn’t a huge problem because we had allowed ourselves plenty of time, but perhaps we should have taken it as an omen.
We got to the airport and made it into the correct terminal. As we searched for the correct check-in counter, we were directed into the longest line in the airport. It was moving along OK, but we waited at least 30 minutes to reach the counter. When asked how many bags we were checking, we proudly proclaimed, “None” (more on that in a minute). We grabbed our boarding passes and headed for the security line.
Their security setup is something I’d like to see in US airports. When each bin comes out of the X-ray machine and gets emptied, you just place it on a line of rollers that sends it back to the beginning of the security prep area. No staff needs to be involved carting them around and they only needed about a dozen bins for each line. We also didn’t have to take our shoes off which was nice.
Just past the metal detector is where our problems started. As we were standing in line, I realized that we’re carrying two nearly full water bottles. I chugged part of mine, but we dumped the rest in a trash can. I had left my belt on (including my hidden pocket), hoping that the buckle and remaining change wouldn’t set off the detector. Wrong. I had to take my belt off and send it through the machine – you know, because you can hide so much in a fabric belt. As I went through the detector the second time, it went off again. An agent patted me down and gave me the OK, but that’s when I realized that Amber had her own problem. Another agent was telling her that we couldn’t carry on the bottle of Brunello we bought in Montalcino. Duh! It’s more way more than 3oz (100 ml) and we didn’t buy it in the airport after we passed through security. I’m not sure how I failed to think that through. Our only choice was to check one of the bags to get it home.
At that point we had about maybe 10 or 15 minutes until our flight was supposed to start boarding. We weren’t sure there would be enough time for one of us to go back and check the bag and get through security again, but we also didn’t want to lose the most expensive bottle of wine from the trip. I told Amber to head back and I would wait. We grabbed a couple of items from one of the backpacks and she rushed off to the check-in counter. She was able to jump into one of the priority lines and get someone to help, although she royally pissed off some other Americans in the process (they were late for their flight – not our problem!). When she got back to the security line, she was able to cheat up the side and to the front of the line. She didn’t really have any stuff with her, so it wasn’t bad getting back through.
When they checked the bag, they took her original boarding pass and gave her a new one for some reason. It didn’t seem like a big deal, except that it didn’t have a seat number on it. When we got to the gate, they were already boarding, so we waited to get to an agent (they have two levels of people checking passports and boarding passes). Amber asked the first lady about where she was supposed to sit, but she didn’t seem to know for sure, although she indicated it may have been the seat beside mine (the one she originally had). When we reached the second guy, he informed us that the flight had checked in full and gave her yet another boarding pass with a seat in a different row. Not cool; a 9+ hour flight and we’re going to be separated.
When we boarded, we were both pretty upset. The plane has two seats on each side, and three in the middle. I had seat 18E, smack in the middle. “If I’m sitting between two strangers for the entire flight, this is going to suck.” Amber found her seat 24G to be occupied by an idiot (and his wife) who didn’t know how to read a seat diagram. She ended up sitting on the other side in 24D. The seat beside me (18D) remained open for almost the entire boarding process. I almost wondered if they had locked up two seats for Amber by mistake. She finally moved up to that seat, just in time for the guy with that seat on his boarding pass to show up. Fortunately, he was nice enough to swap and take her assigned seat back in row 24.
We separated items from the checked backpack in a rush. How many things did we leave in there that we’d like to have on the plane? Let’s see…there’s Amber’s neck pillow. There’s the granola bars we could have eaten two hours ago. There’s the Advil that could have relieved Amber’s headache. We’ll probably think of a few other things before the day is over.
Our departure was delayed by at least 30 minutes. First, we had unexplained delays at the gate. Next, we had to wait in the takeoff line because they had dropped down to a single runway due to the wind. We finally got into the air, but we both were starving. We’d been up since 5:15 and hadn’t eaten anything (it was about 11 when we finally took off). Now it’s 1:30 Rome time and we’ve finally had a snack and a “meal.” Amber’s choice of “pasta” was actually a cheesy mushroom risotto. My choice of “meat” was a rosemary beef stew that wasn’t stew. Neither was very tasty, but they served their purpose to quell the hunger pains. Only 6.5 hours to go…