Day 21 Heading home

Day 21 Heading home word of the day…pipistrello.. bat(the flying kind).
The has come to finally head home. It is with mixed emotions that I think about going home. On one hand I’m ready to go back to my home and my family. I miss my Mom and I miss my own bed and pillow. However, leaving means that I will not see my Italian family for three maybe four years and it gets harder each time we come and go from Italy. This is the conclusion of my 9th trip to Italy in the past 38 years. I have spent a lot of time with the people we have visited over the years. They love me as much and I love them, that is what makes the leaving hard. With all that being said, we were up about 8 am to get ready and finish the final packing. Marco and Michela are gone to see her brother but Martina is home this morning. We are leaving from Pisa which is only about a 40 minute drive compared to Milan, where we have left from in the past, that is over a three hour drive. We usually had to leave a day early to go and spend the night in Milan also. Pisa is much nicer and I understand that this flight from Pisa to NYC has only been available the past year. I’m very happy that Delta has this flight. We have three large suitcases and two pieces of carry on each so Dan had to carry the heavy suitcases down stairs. It was no easy task that’s for sure. Martina was up and greeted us with a good morning. I went to move the car to the front of the house so we could load it up. We were happy that we had the Passat station wagon because it was easy to fit all of luggage into the car. We said our goodbyes to Martina and I reminded her to talk to her Dad about getting his plans set to come to visit us in Vancouver next August. She said that yes she would. We headed out waving our last goodbye to Martina for Pisa. The drive was nice as there was not to much traffic considering it was a Sunday morning and not to many people had headed out to the beach yet. We had to fill up our rental car with gas before we turned it in. It took a bit of driving around until we found the correct street that the gas station was on. It is located next to the airport but in Italy not all roads are connected….you have to drive there to understand. It was a self service station and Dan put the gas in the car. It took 18 gallons of gas and it was over 180 dollars. So you see gas in America is still a pretty good deal considering what Italians are paying. I was dropped off at the main building with our luggage so we didn’t have to carry everything back to the building to catch the shuttle to the terminal. Dan took the car back for check in, it only took about 10 minutes. We caught the shuttle to the terminal. It was a very short ride as Pisa is a very small airport. We had no problem checking in as we are flying first class so there is always a separate line for first class. We headed to the Delta Rooms to wait for a while. It is nice that we can spend our time in the special rooms for first class passengers. They have drinks and snacks for you so you don’t have to spend any money. We had some nuts and something to drink. We headed to our gate about 1 hour before boarding because we had to go through security and get our passports stamped. It was really very smooth as we both travel quite a bit and know exactly how to get through security and want to have in your carry on and what not to. Although I forgot to take out my tanning lotion and it was taken by security. We only had to wait about 10 minutes before they started boarding. We settled into our same seats that we had on the way over. It was a great flight and the food was again outstanding. This time I only had the main entrée and dessert. We settled in after dinner and we both watched Fools Gold. It was a really good movie. The flight took a little over 9 hours to NYC. We had to go through customs in NYC so that meant we had to claim our luggage first. It was a short walk to the baggage claim area. Our bags were some of the first out because they tagged them because we are first class. Going through customs was easy. We just game the officer our customs form and he waved us through. From there we headed to the departing area and we dropped our bags off with a Delta agent and then went through security again. Once through security we headed to the Delta Room for some more relaxation and a few drinks and snacks as we waited. We had about an hour and a half to wait for our flight. We board for our flight we had to get on a portable people mover. Delta does not have enough gates for all the flights they have at JFK. We had about a 7 minute ride to our plane that was parked out on the tarmac. Once we were all settled on board and we pushed away from the gate the pilot got on the speaker and told us the bad news. There was only one runway open for takeoffs and one for landings and we were number 66 in line and it was going to be an hour and a half until take off. “are you kidding me?” Well we were served our dinner and many drinks and three hours later we finally took off. The flight was a bit bumpy across the US. I was able to get a few hours of sleep and we finally landed at 1:30 am. We were both very happy to be home and tired at the same time. We had ordered a town car and he was there for us on time. Our luggage was the first off again which was awesome and we headed over to load up the car for the ride home. We had the same driver on the way home as we did on the way to the airport. We arrived home to our wonderful house and our two cats at 2:30 am. It was sooo good to be home. I took a long shower and then went to bed with my own pillows! Yes what a great trip!!