Day 1 (Nov. 10, travel)

It started out pretty much as planned, the way most trips (even those with our lack of planning) do. We got up around 4am in order to be at the Denver airport around 5:30am for our 7am flight. The TSA decided that Berck’s passport was fake, so he demanded to speak to a supervisor, who agreed that his passport was, indeed, fake. The problem seemed to have to do with the fact that the picture was not perfectly centered in its square. Berck finally managed to convince them to ignore the passport (which he’d only presented because it was the easiest thing to get to) and instead produced a Colorado driver’s license which seemed to satisfy the TSA. We’ll note that Berck has traveled using this passport not entirely infrequently for the past 8 years, and this was the first time someone had complained about it.

We arrived at the gate about the time that the flight was boarding, and got boarding passes right away. US Airways does some strange boarding system with aisle/window boarding that probably makes good sense on paper, but in general is confusing. We were assigned a window/aisle pair on the Airbus 319, with Jonah taking the window seat as usual, Berck in the aisle and no one in between. The legroom was ample, the seats reclined plenty.

The flight wasn’t unpleasant, and Jonah watched the inflight movie with a pair of Delta headphones while Berck slept. We arrived in Philadelphia about noon there, but feeling like some breakfast would be nice. We ate some Chick-Fil-A, and then spent the next 5 hours watching various downloaded television on the Macbook–not a bad way to kill time.

The US Airways gate agents put us together for the overseas flight. On those you actually get food, though it takes forever for them to serve it, when all you really want to do is sleep. They also have several movies on demand, so you don’t have to wait for them to start at a particular time. Joanna watched the Shrek the Third, and Berck watched the first quarter of it.

Travel to Roma

Flying overseas coach sucks, and there’s just no two ways about it. We were in the middle, unfortunately, though Berck had an aisle seat. His legs were killing him, and he kept bumping into Joanna, who would wake up yet again. Hopefully, we’ll get to stretch out on the way home. Still some O.J. and a “Buttermilk Bar” woke us up before we landed. We managed to cut in front of most of our fellow passengers by taking the stairs instead of the escalator and got through immigration in record time. Berck somehow remembered how to get to the airport train and find us a bathroom and get cash without any trouble, and we were soon chugging along the outskirts of Roma to Termini.