My observation at that moment was that Italians are often better talkers than listeners, and as warm and friendly as they are in general, they can get officious and unhelpfully bureaucratic if it strikes them. Any first class hotel deals with a situation like the vouchers withThis was not my only instance observing that this day, as it turned out. So all this fussing held us up slightly, and may have been distracting, but we got on the road a bit after 7 and everything seemed to be going smoothly.
Then, when we were about an hour from Sorrento, a bit past Pompeii, I asked Ronnie if I could have some money for tolls. She looked in her bag and couldn’t find her wallet, and I realized holy crap, or some similar 4-lettered thought, I had taken her wallet out of her bag to keep it in the safe when she wasn’t using it and forgot to retrieve it. She didn’t even know I’d taken it, so it was all on me.
Everyone graciously accepted that it was all my fault, so I called the hotel, who checked the room and found the wallet. Unfortunately, It’s Sunday, so the courier could not be contacted, but they promised to ship it to us the next day. It we hadn’t grabbed the passports we would have had to turn around, which probably would have meant missing the flight.
Two takeaways from this. First of all, I spent the next hour or so beating myself up over this. I’m a pretty forgiving sort, but there’s a certain amount of self-beating that needs to take place in order to learn from your mistakes. If you just decide it’s not a big deal, it’s just a screw-up. Hopefully I learned something about rushing departures. The other takeaway is that this is just like the kinds of things that happen to other skilled professionals, where you can do something really well, and I had been congratulating myself on my excellent planning and execution of this whole trip, and I screw up the simplest, most basic thing- bring home all your stuff. I’ll still be annoyed at myself until the wallet arrives, but I deserve that.
As it turned out, we didn’t need the cash- the toll road took credit cards and I had enough cash in any event. We zipped most of the way to Rome until we got pretty close to the airport, where things slowed down considerable. I’d checked earlier and knew that US Airways flew out of Terminal 5, because the airport sign just said US. Finding terminal 5 turned out to be quite difficult, in part I think because there is no terminal 4, so terminal 5 seemed to be in a different direction from 1, 2 and 3. There was a sign next to terminal 3 that said terminal 5 but there was nothing around it, so we kept going. Finally, seemingly in the middle of nowhere stood a small building with lots of police tape around it. It was the mythical terminal 5. Given that this place was really far from the rental car dropoff, we decided to check all the bags and check in and then I’d go take care of the car. Then our plans met the Italians.
The setup in this place was like no other I’d seen. Before you could go to check in, you had to answer security questions, and the check-in woman insisted that we had to drop the car off first and then check the bags, but that we needed to hurry because baggage check was closing in 20 minutes. I tried to explain that, though we were all one family, that R&C were on a separate reservation and should therefore be able to check in and then I’d follow, with my bag if necessary. “No, this is US security regulations, now I need to help the next people.” She had completely stopped listening and was doing the bureaucrat thing. Fortunately, another agent called someone and made it all okay. R&C could check all the bags and I could go drop off the car.
Whew! I rode off with the car and then pretty much ran from the office to that weird terminal 5 at terminal 3 which was in fact a bus stop for terminal 5. A bus pulled up as I was coming down the stairs, so I jumped on and was right back to the terminal. I said a friendly hello to the unhelpful agent who kind of pretended not to know me and shuffled me off to actual check-in place, which was around the corner. All of this was going pretty quickly, because the place was empty.
Got my boarding pass and met up with R&C at the tax refund place, then though security into terminal G. Where was terminal G? I have no idea, but it wasn’t at terminal 5, you had to take a bus there. So we piled on the bus and waited and waited and finally drove off to terminal G. None of the places I’d been since dropping off the car had been air conditioned, so at this point my clothes were soaked though with sweat and my head was dripping. This is not an exaggeration. I was drenched.
Anyway, we get to terminal G, and for some reason, they’d begun boarding our flight an hour before it was scheduled to leave. We hadn’t eaten breakfast, so we went and got food and were among the last to board…another bus. No room at terminal G for the US Airways plane, so onto another hot, airless bus until the very last person was boarded at which time we drove a few yards (I’m sorry, meters) from the terminal and then stopped for unknown reasons for about 3 minutes. Maybe there was a traffic light out there. Then we finally got near the plane, and after only another couple of minutes while the bus driver discussed something with the ground service people, we got off the bus. Then up a very long flight of steps and finally on the plane. This was over an hour since we’d arrived at the airport and we hadn’t stood still for a moment.
Then, the plane just sat there for 40 minutes, but it was air conditioned so I didn’t care. At least we were kind of on our way. We flew to Philly and arrived about 10 minutes early in fact, only to sit on the tarmac for over an hour waiting for an open gate. Wow, PHL can be an awful airport.
But we're home. Exhausted, but home.
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