Going home. Loooog Travel Day! Little did we know how long! Uneventful travel is always aspirational but not often realized.
We left the Rome hotel in a ride arranged by VBT. It was the nicest van of the trip.
Our departure time from the hotel was three hours in advance of our flight. We have to assume that VBT knows enough about the location of the hotel and how long it would take to get to the airport. That turned out to be right and we arrived in plenty of time to get to the gate.
I guess I am spoiled living in Syracuse where it takes 15-20 minutes, because we threaded through neighborhoods and two-lane streets, lots of traffic, stop signs, and traffic lights before getting to a high-speed road. It probably took about 45 minutes, not an unreasonable amount of travel time considering that Rome is a major city. But it still made me nervous.
The Rome airport is a temple to gods of capitalism. In order to get to the gates, you have to pass through a shopping center where there is no direct route to pass through.
They are apparently successful in getting people to finish spending their remaining Euros because there was a huge bank of registers as you enter the concourse.
And then, like any other airport, the concourses are lined by shops. It's a shopping mall with video displays.
The flight to Newark was completely full and getting people, luggage, and food on the plane took a while. We were slightly delayed, but we weren’t worried because we had a four hour lay-over in Newark.
The fight itself was pretty uneventful. Passing through customs and passport control went smoothly. It was only after got ready to head to our gate that we were informed that our flight to Syracuse had been canceled. Since I was the last one to get through TSA, Mike and Walter researched options and there were no more flight options that day. So rather than spend the night in an airport hotel, we rented a car and drove home.
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