{"id":517,"date":"2005-08-04T16:50:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-04T22:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/04\/italy-trip-getting-there\/"},"modified":"2005-08-04T16:50:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-04T22:50:00","slug":"italy-trip-getting-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/04\/italy-trip-getting-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Italy Trip: Getting There"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><lj-cut text=\"Click here for the gruesome details on the day of the flight...\">Jul 19, 2005<\/p>\n<p> 11:00am I&#8217;m sitting at the S&#8217;barro seating area at the Dayton International Airport. I&#8217;ve got a peach smoothiethat I&#8217;m sipping on ($3.80 from Boston Stoker). It&#8217;s very tasty. The object of today&#8217;s flying? Get to Rome!<\/p>\n<p> <i>[Present day Trina cutting in here. This is the first entry in my paper journal that I kept during the trip. I&#8217;m making corrections as I go, but so far, am terribly faithful to it. You can tell by the sheer tedium I&#8217;m writing about. I&#8217;ll start cutting out the tedious comments as I go as well, or you&#8217;ll all be sleeping on your keyboards.]<\/i><\/p>\n<p> Unfortunately my last journal was left in a Big Boy in Michigan back in April, so I&#8217;ve no idea what I last wrote about in my print journal. My electronic journal is a bit more up to date. <i>[That&#8217;s what she thinks!]<\/i> I decided against bringing my laptop on this trip because of the carrying issue, electrical issue, and lack of &#8216;net issue. I&#8217;ve got lots of electronics with me, however. So boredom won&#8217;t ever be an issue. <i>[It wasn&#8217;t]<\/i><\/p>\n<p> So, what&#8217;s up with this trip? Well, back in October &#8217;03 our BW3&#8217;s group first talked about renting a villa in Tuscany. We&#8217;ve done a lot of plotting and planning since then and 18 of us are going to Roma for 3 days and the villa for 7 days.<\/p>\n<p> I&#8217;m the only one taking US Air to Rome &#8211; most of the rest are taking Northwest. Even <a href=\"https:\/\/judiang.livejournal.com\"><b>judiang<\/b><\/a> (who is my roomie) is taking the Detroit->Rome leg of it. I&#8217;ll be on the same flight as everyone for the way back, however.<\/p>\n<p> <i>[The next several paragraphs are a summary of what we intended to do on the trip. Since I&#8217;ll be reporting on what we actually did, it seems a bit silly to include that here too, so I skipped &#8217;em.]<\/i><\/p>\n<p> 2:20pm Now sitting near my gate (I think) at Philly&#8217;s airport. The place is practically deserted at the moment since most international flights leave at night. Mine&#8217;s at 6:10pm, so I&#8217;ve got a bit of a layover.<\/p>\n<p> 5:10pm Still at gate and so is our plane (has been for some time). Judi, meanwhile, got her times confused and left for the airport late. I&#8217;m hoping the lack of contact since her call means she&#8217;s in the air now to Detroit. Please let it be so!<\/p>\n<p> 5:53pm Good news! Judi&#8217;s luggage made the flight! Bad news &#8211; Judi&#8217;s body did not! Crap! So, she&#8217;s going to try and get on standby to Amsterdam and then from there on to Italy. If things work out, she can be in Rome by 3pm. Wow! Poor Judi! I&#8217;m hoping she can get there OK.<\/p>\n<p> In the Good News camp again, we&#8217;re on the Airbus A330 rather than the Boeing 767. That means we get the ability to pick our own inflight entertainment! Sweet. There&#8217;s even a remote control! And the adapter for my headphones fits the jacks. Still dunno how well they work. <i>[Got Magnavox noise cancellation headphones for the plane &#8211; only $35 at Walmart.]<\/i><\/p>\n<p> Movie choices include <i>Hitch<\/i> and <i>Robots<\/i>, so I think I&#8217;ll pick them. Who knows what Northwest will offer for the ride back. <\/p>\n<p> Oh, interesting sign of the times: The old No Smoking lighted signs have been replaced with &#8220;Please turn off electronic devices&#8221; signs.<\/p>\n<p> Captain&#8217;s just welcomed us. We should be pushing off shortly.<\/p>\n<p> 6:25pm Departing a little late &#8211; a connecting flight arrived late, but we&#8217;re all here now! And we&#8217;re off to Rome!<\/p>\n<p> 7:00pm Ha! Spoke too soon. Yup, we&#8217;re still on the ground, trying to get to the front of the queue. <\/lj-cut><\/p>\n<p> Now, although this journal entry hasn&#8217;t actually talked about the arrival to Rome, I&#8217;m going to include a couple of photos from Rome. There will be more in the next post when I write about the arrival.<\/p>\n<p> <lj-cut text=\"Two pictures from Rome - more to come later!\"><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.pagefillers.com\/travel\/Italy\/JudiTreenVatican.jpg\" width=375 height=500 alt=\"Judi and Trina in Vatican City.\"><br \/> Judi and Trina in Vatican City. If you look closely, <a href=\"https:\/\/elsaf.livejournal.com\"><b>elsaf<\/b><\/a>, you&#8217;ll see the Pope in the background, left. He&#8217;s spying on us, but we just ignored him.<\/p>\n<p> <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.pagefillers.com\/travel\/Italy\/heffalump.jpg\" width=375 height=500 alt=\"The Heffalump Monument.\"><br \/> I liked this particular monument. I like heffalumps. And woozles. No woozles on this one, however. And what&#8217;s with all the Egyptian needles? The Romans were obsessed, I think.<\/div>\n<p><\/lj-cut><\/p>\n<p> In other news, work was a bitch today (and yesterday), but my new video card (for my new computer) arrived today and installed nicely. I can now play City of Heroes on my new PC. Also, Semagic is able to detect music from QCD &#8211; woot! Oh, and while listening to Information Society, I discovered they did a cover of Abba&#8217;s &#8220;Lay All Your Love on Me.&#8221; Heh, never noticed before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jul 19, 2005 11:00am I&#8217;m sitting at the S&#8217;barro seating area at the Dayton International Airport. I&#8217;ve got a peach smoothiethat I&#8217;m sipping on ($3.80 from Boston Stoker). It&#8217;s very tasty. The object of today&#8217;s flying? Get to Rome! [Present day Trina cutting in here. This is the first entry in my paper journal that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[137,181,30,191,94],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-livejournal","tag-airplane","tag-italy","tag-photos","tag-rome","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pagefillers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}