March 17, 2010
- 4:00am Pacific Time – up, shower, last minute packing, cat comforting
- 5:15am – Taylor and Mary Beth arrive to pick me up
- 5:45am – Drop Taylor’s rental car off at Seatac and shuttle to terminal
- 6:00am – Check in at American Airlines, proceed through security, head to gate. Meet Tobin, Bill and Jaxie along the way. Frank is also at SeaTac but on a different airline, in a different terminal. Call my father to wish him a happy birthday.
- 8:45am – Plane takes off about 40 minutes late. Flying time 5 hours. I catch about 2 hours of sleep, during the movie.
- 4:30pm Eastern Time – Arrive JFK about 15 minutes late. Switching to our Al Italia flights involves exiting the secure terminal, taking a train to the furthest other terminal, and going through security again. This is time-consuming. We don’t have seat assignments yet for the Al Italia flights, and by now our departure time is getting close. We go to the airline counter before going through security. They are a little baffled by our situation, but very obliging. It takes some doing, but they get us seating assignments (scattered all over the plane) and boarding passes, and then one of their people escorts us to the front of the security line, pissing off several hundred harried travelers. We arrive at the gate where boarding is just about completed, and make it in time.
- 6:05pm – Our flight departs for Rome. 7 hours and 30 minutes of one of the most abominable airplanes I have ever encountered; insanely cramped seating. I have a window seat (I prefer aisles) but the outside rows are only 2 seats so that is not so bad. My neighbor is a twitchy 20-year-old who squirms nonstop for the entire flight. Lovely person, but yow. Pretty reasonable food, and I managed 3 good catnaps. General discomfort slightly mollified by the sight of the sun rising over the Alps.
- 7:20am European Time – Arrive Da Vinci airport in Rome. No particular difficulties here. The lines and the wait to go through security and passport control were pretty brutal, and getting to our next gate involved a marathon walk, but we had plenty of time. Had I not been in state of sleep deprivation and temporal displacement induced semi-psychosis, it would have been a walk in the park. Found our gate and planted ourselves for the hour or so we had to wait. Don Deane was there as well. Bill and I ventured out for coffee (ooooh) and a visit to the duty-free store.
- 9:20am – Board the shuttle bus that will take us to the plane. At the last minute, Tony arrives; his flight from NY had been delayed, but he had sprinted through the airport and arrived just as the doors were about to close. We boarded the plane, a small commuter jet, for the 1-hour flight to Ancona.
- 9:50am – Departure from Rome. A pleasant and uneventful flight. The irony of the fact that the seats on this plane were spacious and comfortable for this little plane and this short flight did not escape us. A beautiful day out, and the view from the plane breathtaking.
- 11:00am – Arrive Ancona. Walk across tarmac to small terminal to await the fate of our luggage. Happily, all guitars arrive intact. All bags also make it, except Tony’s which was not able to sprint across Da Vince as quickly as he did, and so did not make it past Rome yet. Only an inconvenience.
- 11:30am – Go through customs and find Allesandro waiting on the other side. All is well. Six of us load our gear into a car and ourselves into a cab and head for Sassoferrato, about an hour’s drive. Allesandro needs to stay at the airport to meet Frank. Tony stays with him to deal with his missing baggage issues. Don draws the short straw in terms of the available space in the departing cars, and waits at the airport as well.
- 12:30pm – Arrive Convento La Pace, Sassoferrato, Italy. Every face I see is a happy reunion. Totally worth the trip.
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