Lift-off Day

So, today is lift-off day. The next time I'll have an opportunity to provide an update will be tomorrow and Nancy and I will be on another continent.

Our flight (Lufthansa 483 for those who care) leaves at 7:40pm so, as I am travelling with a person of the opposite sex, I will leave for the airport 4 hours early.

Yesterday was spent in a (unusual for me) frenzy of nail-biting; re-packing and all that. Did I allow enough time to change planes in Frankfurt? A 22 minute hold on the phone to Lufthansa for a 30 second reassurance settled that one. Both our bags are grossly overweight, especially mine, again unusual for me as I've been known to go over the pond with nothing more than my carry-on. But as I've gotten heavier so have my bags. I'll never forget being dropped off on the wrong side of the Grand Canal in Venice and having to drag my immense suitcase over the Rialto bridge which is nothing more than an arch of steps.

We will finally arrive in Rome tomorrow, at 2:05pm local time if my calculations are correct, where it will be as hot as the hinges of hell; a high of 97F per weather.com. The good news, as the chart at the top shows, is that it gets cooler every day culminating in a week with a high of 77F and a chilly overnight of 63F. That will be a pleasant change after a summer under the laser beam heat of south Florida.

This blog thing is an interesting thing. I did my first travel blog in 2001. (ItaliaEtAlia for those that care.) I had to hand code the entire thing as blogs, if they existed at all, were new then. Now they're passé . Everybody tweets I suppose. If it doesn't have a picture and has more than two lines of text it can't engage the current audience. Who would have thought that a half page of text would become thought of as "long form" narrative?

p.s. Does everyone recognize the image at the very top, the header, as coming from a promotional poster for the film Roman Holiday?