Day 41, Sunday October 15, 2017

I didn’t get a chance to post anything last night as we were busy cleaning and packing to be ready for our flight to Italy today.  The morning went well, we had a great flight and we arrived 15 minutes early in Rome.  Here is our first view of Italy. Then our day changed. We boarded a very crowded bus for the drive from our plane to the terminal and waited for 10 minutes packed like sardines before the bus decided to move. We arrived at the terminal and there was a huge line of people waiting to go through customs. We joined the throngs of people waiting in line, and then we waited, and waited and waited.  It took us more than two hours to get through customs. Here are some of the people ahead of us…and here are some of the people behind us…and here are the rest of the people who arrived after we did!  They were lined all the way out the door.

We finally made it through customs and then it took almost another hour to get our luggage. The people were lined up four and five deep and there was luggage from five different flights on that one carousel.We arrange for our rental car only to find that the trunk is so small only one suitcase will fit inside, so back to the counter to change cars. They did upgrade us for free which was nice and we are finally on our way. Just a quick stop at a mall to get a SIM card for our phone.  We wait at least 15 minutes there before we are served and once we get our SIM card we find out that it will take two hours for it to become activated. That was about 6 hours ago and we are still waiting for that to happen.  We finally arrive at our bnb, almost two hours later than planned.

Bob thinks that things just take longer in Italy. So far they sure have. We are very happy though that we were not stuck in the 13 km long traffic jam we see on the freeway heading towards Rome! Tomorrow we go to Venice. Here’s hoping for a better day, today was long and tiring.