Monday, July 09, 2012
2012 Italy - Day 18 - To Sacramento
A very long travel day home…
Up at 5:00 a.m., we caught a 5:30 hotel shuttle to the airport. We had an uneventful hour flight on Lufthansa from Milan to Frankfurt. I was surprised at both the Linate and Frankfort airports that they used buses to take us back and forth to the planes. At each airport, we loaded on to the plane with stairs pushed up to the front and back of the planes.
We had a long scheduled four hour lay-over at Frankfurt. For the second time in four days, we got a little sideways again. The layout of the Frankfurt Airport is a mess. We spent a couple of hours wandering around trying to find somewhere to sit down and eat. There were too many voices trying to decide which way to go and what to do. Given how much we have traveled, these struggles surprised me.
Eventually, we boarded an eight and a half hour US Airways flight from Frankfurt to Philadelphia. Although we left about 45 minutes late, we got there a couple of minutes early.
Getting off the plane in Philly, we walked into one of the biggest messes I have ever seen. There must have been 1,000 people in the passport control lines. It took over an hour to work our way through the line. With only an hour and 55 minutes between flights, we were starting to cut it close.
Once through passport control, we grabbed our luggage, breezed through customs and then rechecked our luggage. Sharon was very concerned about the weight of one or two of the bags. Lufthansa didn't appear to weigh the bags when we checked them in Linate. They bags were checked through to Sacramento. Given that the bags were already checked to Sacramento, we did not have to recheck them in Philly; we just handed them to a porter to load on a conveyor belt. I am sure that Sharon's bag was probably 5 to 10 pounds overweight...
We had a long hike to the gate for the flight to Sacramento. They started boarding about 5 minutes after we got there.
Again the flight took off about 45 minutes late, but we landed in Sacramento only about 15 minutes behind schedule. Given how long we have been gone, I had a little trouble finding the car. I had remember how I parked it, but not which floor. [note to self: write it down!] By the time, we got home it was about 10:30 p.m. This is 6:30 a.m. Tuesday in Italian time. We had been up and moving for over 25 1/2 hours.
It was a great trip. I hope to do two more posts in the next week. First, my top ten things from the trip. Second, I am going to put together a list of random observations.
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Still waiting to hear about your time spent with the Italian police!
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