At Least It's a Start

Well we made it. I wasn't so sure there a couple of times, but we finally got to our hotel room at about 11:30 p.m. We should have been here at 6:00 p.m.  We had to change our flight from London to Rome 2 times due to delays. I also was scrambling madly (2 different times) to try to notify our B&B in Rome, who had arranged a car service to pick us up, due to the new flight times. I found it impossible to get the free wireless at Heathrow airport to work, so opted to use my credit card in the phone machines they have strategically placed all over. Well, my card didn't work because I hadn't told the bank about England as a travel stop, only Italy, so it was declined. Great. I had visions of the poor driver standing in Rome with his little  "Ochs" signs for hours with no Ochs showing up.

I did manage to find six FREE well-used computers that were free for anyone which I made a bee-line for with great joy only to find I couldn't log into my email for some reason. It took me a couple of tries to figure out the "t" was broken, so I moved on to another one. That one had a broken mouse. The third one worked - kinda; at least enough for me to get a note out to the B&B about our changed plans. Whew. But my anxiety would not go away until I knew it was really taken care of with a reply back from them. I kept checking over the hour...nothing. Oh nice. We finally had to leave my computer umbilical chord to go to our gate for boarding and finish our final leg of the journey. Bittersweet, yes, I know.

While walking through a very quiet hallway (imagine that in Heathrow), I quickly pinged the free wifi again and surprise, surprise, got through! I quickly placed a Skype call and talked to the kind lady at our lodging and verified that we still had car service (the driver had gone and waited for us already and decided to wait for us - 5 hours!). She suggested we give him a good tip. Yeah. One problem averted.

So we landed in Rome, breezed through immigration, literally 5 minutes, grabbed our luggage, found the driver with the "Ochs" sign and headed to the car. Got stuck at the parking Garage cuz his ticket wouldn't work and had a line of cars with drivers yelling in Italian at him for holding up the line with him pushing the attendant button over and over until somehow magically the bar raised (maybe 10 minutes) and we got outta there and headed towards the city. Now, we have been to Rome before, and even exhausted we were excited seeing ruins on our way. We made it.

We checked in and plopped our bags into the room and headed out for a very late dinner, got lost walking back. I did a quick check of email before bed and found about 9 emails from my bank that charges had been made in Luxembourg and did I recognize them? Well golly gee, no I did not. So now our main card that gives me the airline miles is suspended and a new card is on it's way to me within 5-7 business days (Kent of course). Lovely.

This is going to be a wonderful trip. I can feel it in my bones. Oh, and by the way. It is supposed to be 90 degrees today.