We said goodbye to the girls at about 9am on Thursday – we dropped them off at my parents house for the week – or as we like to call it “Camp Grandma Grandpa’s”. They have a pretty action-packed week ahead of them. Katie had her African Drumming and Dancing workshop at the Community College on Thursday with the performance that night. On Friday they were going to go to a rodeo north of Fergus at night. On Saturday, they are heading down to the Cities to have a couple sleep-overs at their cousin Parker’s house. On Sunday, they are going to the Mall of America to hit the rides, then Monday they are coming back to Grandmas after meeting for a picnic lunch in St. Cloud. From there it gets quieter, but they always have Grandpa’s new boat to try out and a lake to play in, so I doubt they’ll be bored. We’ll be back late next Friday night.
We used frequent flyer miles to book our airline tickets, and neither of us had enough of a balance to pay for both, so we each used our own miles. Because of that, the system didn’t think we were together. We were able to pick seats together on the flight to Rome, but for the trip to Detroit I was up front and Becky was in the back. Fortunately she sat by someone who was stuck in a middle seat and more than willing to switch seats with me. We got to Detroit about 4:30 and didn’t leave again until 7:30, so we had some time to kill. We went to the Mediterrean Grill and watched a movie while we ate some appetizers.
We hopped on our flight to Rome and it wasn’t very full. We were sitting one row behind an exit row, so when no one had arrived to claim the exit row in front of us, we moved up. Except there was a family of 4 plus grandparents who came on at the last minute, and filed into our previous seats. Becky thought she had three seats to herself, but they were then taken up by the grandparents. So we moved over to an aisle exit row and I was happy to have about 8 feet of leg room instead of the 8 inches I would’ve had in my regular seat. The flight offered a personal TV with movies on it, so that was cool. We tried to simultaneously watch “Date Night” and that was a good show. We started on “Valentine’s Day” but got too tired to make it too long. We both slept some on the flight, but the aforementioned family had a two year old girl who cried for about an hour and a half straight during peak sleeping time. I was pleasantly surprised that no one tried to throw her off the plane, but there were a lot of grumpy passengers in our section. I tried to watch a little more of the movie to drown out the noise, but was too tired and couldn’t really get comfortable. They woke Becky and me up with about an hour left in the flight for a little breakfast and we just kinda zoned out the rest of the way until we landed smoothly. We didn’t have to go through customs – just a quick passport control when we landed.
We hopped the train into the heart of Rome – the main train station (Termini) is right by our hotel, so that worked well. We got to see some of the countryside and the outskirts of Rome on the train, but Becky and I were both messed up enough from the flight that we couldn’t really process anything. We ended up getting out of Termini about 6 blocks from the front of it, so we had a longer walk than we wanted but we made it to our decent hotel room and passed out.
We had the camera locked up in the suitcase, so we didn’t really get any pictures besides this one of Becky’s next to our very antiquated, but cool elevator in our hotel.
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