25 Thursday

Thursday morning half of the group got up early to depart by bus by 6:30 or 6:45 for Northern Italy, and the extension of the tour.  Sounds like this was the “party time” as they were all talking about the wine and relaxation they were looking forward to in the next week.  We were a little jealous!  The other half of the group got almost an hour more sleep, then boarded the bus for Fiumicino (the main airport for Rome, FCO, is not in Rome, but on the coast in Fiumicino). 

When we arrived, since most of the party was going on some “other” airline and through PHL, we said our goodbyes and headed briskly for the AA flight to JFK.  We had a LOT of time, since our flight left more than an hour after theirs.  We found something to eat and sat where I could watch the planes from around the world taxi and take off outside my window!  It really gave the sense of being on a … small planet!!

What do you want to bet the name has NOTHING to do with the seats?

AA 767 and Evil Empire A330 (with half our tour group)

We got Business Class, so had a nice flight, and even got to JFK a bit early.  We figured we might even have time to catch the direct flight out of JFK to DFW.  But, through a little glitch with the bags, by the time we got to recheck them, we missed the cut time by 3 minutes!!  Even more frustrating was that we could have gotten the bags sooner if we noticed someone pulling all of the bags off the belt (before they got to us) and if we had not first stopped to cram our duty-free liquor into the bag to be checked.  So, we took a bus to La Guardia, ran through that muck, and ended up catching a delayed 6PM flight to DFW.  We finally got to the house about 10PM, some 24 hours after we got up.  We took the rest of the weekend off and did not much of anything!

I have about one more blog, with assorted pix, not particularly related to any given day, which I hope to post in the next couple of days.