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| Paul's face after he added up how much money he spent |
As noted previously I was unable to generate a boarding pass for myself to get on the flight out of Rome; Nancy's generated and downloaded perfectly (in three different formats as I tried to get mine to work). Ultimately on a call to Lufthansa someone said to try a kiosk at the airport. Well, rather than that I decided, since we were at the airport, to simply deal with a person; the saga continues.
The previous report:
No problems at Fiumicino, Aeroporti di Roma. We were directed to the First Class desk, presumably based upon our character, certainly not our tickets, where we both were issued boarding passes, still in the anciently familiar "IBM card" card stock. That made my first and Nancy her third copy. So, some hours early but with free WiFi, we're awaiting our flight to Frankfurt DE.
In planning this trip I had allowed for one and one half hours to change planes in Frankfurt which seemed generous. Then I received an email from Lufthansa saying to allow for additional time for flights entering the U.S. to clear additional security. (They could have mentioned this before I was booking. I did however book through a third-party service; I'll transfer the blame to them.) At any rate an hour and a half still seemed, if not generous, adequate.
I have now flown in Italy quite a few times both domestically (within Italy) and internationally and I have never, repeat "never", had a flight leave on time. Once in Milan my Alitalia flight didn't start boarding until an hour after the scheduled departure and then we sat on the runway for two and a half hours.
This trip wasn't that bad. What was initially announced as a twenty minute delay ended up stretching into an hour; that hour and a half now seemed pitifully inadequate. However on the way to Frankfurt the pilot announced that by a combination of increased speed and shortcuts granted we had made up about thirty minutes; okay, now one hour to change planes.
The truly terrible Lufthansa customer service at the gate informed us that we would need to go to Terminal Z. "Not far." It was. And all U.S. bound planes were directed through the same security funnel. However as we had rushed down there we still had what seemed to me to be plenty of time.
Until I was selected for a random enhanced security check. Nancy and I were separated. Oddly all this U.S. security was being handled by Italians and either through language barriers or the indifference resulting from doing this dozens of times every day the official in charge was not a great communicator. Once he had a group of us we were shuffled past the long line snaking to security (this was looking better) and in twos and threes had our computers and shoes swiped for explosives.
The upshot here was that when I checked in at the gate and asked if Mrs. Matthews had checked in I was informed "she's right behind you." I can only guess that the reason they would know this is that Nancy was absolutely the last person not checked-in on the flight manifest. She reports that once she got past the long snaking line she had to pass through rooms, upstairs and downstairs, all without signs. But she got there. And what seemed like an endless series of downstairs, turn a corner, down a passage, more stairs, led us to a bus that took us to the plane with, as it turned out, twenty minutes before the scheduled take-off. How much longer the bus would have waited on Nancy and me and whether there would have been another bus is unknown.
So, an uneventful if long (fourteen hours?) flight of dozing, movies, and an endless succession of drinks, treats, and meals and we were in Tampa and I was dreading Customs. I once had to clear U.S. Customs in Toronto and it was a tortuous process of standing in line, talking to an official, standing in another line, etc. Here our bags were unloaded on a Baggage Claim just for us as we got off the plane, a brief line then a electronic customs card, hand the resulting ticket to an official and we were done; not more than five minutes.
Delightful Shirley and Camille were waiting for us and whisked us back to Bradenton where, other than piles of debris from the hurricane clean-up, all was pretty much as we left it.
