DAY ONE: Sunday, July 1, 2007• Sacramento to Dulles

DAY ONE: Sunday, July 1, 2007• Sacramento to Dulles
It’s 7:25 and we’re in the air heading for Dulles near Washington DC. How can I explain? Somehow it’s never easy for us to get away, especially because we are going to be gone a full two weeks and there was so much coordination to do with the kids. I was a bit tired from being in New York and getting stuck in Salt Lake City on Friday night. Christine had a rough week with her dad as he finally realized he didn’t want to stay out at the ranch alone at night. So almost inevitably we had the usual meltdown and we almost decided to just stay home. Zoe had a million questions and wanted us to say yes to staying another week at Wildwood in August because they asked her to come back to help out. Robert, who had been doing fine, finally realized that staying out with papa might mean he wasn’t going to get to do as much as he wanted to with his “Sacramento friends.” So a battle of who is or isn’t grateful and who is making too big of a deal of it all ensued which lead to anger, yelling and finally, apologies. But we still were actually pretty close to canceling the whole thing. Or at least that possibility sounded good at the time
I will still pray that the stress won’t get to us all the next time we are trying to get out of town. Can we ever manage not to be panicked and stressed out before we go?

We got up at 3:30 a.m., finished packing, showered and headed out to the airport with Kate at about 4:50. Check-in was quick and easy. We were flying on United on free tickets from my mileage plus miles. I discovered that you could book any flight at any time if you used double miles. So for 100,000 each we were set. The other amazing aspect was it has only been this year that United had a flight that went directly to Rome from the US. On the double miles thing you could only fly on an United flight, not with any of the partners. In the past United had only flown into Milan and then they even stopped that a couple of years ago.
The international line at the United counter was much shorter than the domestic line. The security line wrapped back past the luggage carousel, but the line went quite quickly and we make it through security right around 6 a.m. We both had aisles on the Sacramento to Dulles leg of the flight, just not together. Last night we purchased Economy Plus seats from Dulles to Rome for about $100 each one way, which should be great. I am in row 23c one row from the back. There was drama about the plane leaving late as they waited for one passenger who was late who they wound up not waiting for. A guy with a dog in a crate was sitting next to me and then he moved into an empty seat that belonged to a woman who came late because she was trying to get a free ticket. So she got stuck in the middle seat and decided to do the noble thing of not forcing anyone to move.

The flight was quite uneventful. Watched an episode of The Office, slept, ate a few Biscoffs, drank some Cran-Apple and got in at about 3:00 Dulles time. The woman near the window claimed she heard someone say that we were to leave our belongings in case of an emergency, but I never heard it. The turbulence was a little rough, but not that bad by any means. We have between three and four hours to wait for our 6:15 departure to Rome, so I’ve found an outlet to charge my computer. It’s up to 78% now so I’m just chillin’. Christine is sitting across the way in the waiting area reading.

We ate a couple of Sweet Onion and Chicken Teriyaki’s at Subway and then waited until we left at about 6:45. Apparently they plan extra time in on the flight times to handle any thing that comes up because now it looks like we are still going to get in 50 minutes early!
The flight has gone well. We are sitting in Economy Plus which has been great for the leg room. I’m sitting next to a 12 year old returning to Sicily. His dad works for the Italian embassy in Washington, DC. A cute kid (Flavio) with a funny younger brother (Niccolo) wiggled ALL NIGHT long, but is finally asleep.
It’s currently 10:15 p.m. at–add nine hours and it’s morning here. The missing night. I slept a bit but mostly rested with my eyes shut. It will be Interesting to see if Robert got out to the ranch all right.