February 25
After three great weeks in Italy, it is time to go home. We initially had the wrong departure time for our connecting flight to London. Now that we have the right time, we realize that we have time for breakfast before we head to our boat! Despite the fact that we have bright sun and temperatures in the 50's, I'm wearing my snow boots because they don't fit in my suitcase. C'est la vie - sorry switched into French for a second. I guess it should be Così è la vita!
We arrive at the dock in plenty of time to catch our ride to the airport. This time we are looking for a yellow boat that says Alilaguna, a different boat company from the one that operates the vaporetto. There are a number of other people with suitcases here so we're sure we're in the right place. When the boat arrives, we are wondering where they will put our suitcases, but they have a place on the deck for them, so we don't have to haul them down below deck for the 45-minute ride to the Marco Polo airport. It is a beautiful day in Venice so the ride to the airport is smooth except for when we cross the wakes of other boats, but I can imagine that this ride would not be so fun in stormy weather.
The dock at the airport is just like a subway or train station with multiple docks to service the many boats coming not just from Venice and the nearby islands, but also from the mainland:
We pick up our bags, scan our Alilaguna tickets and head toward the very long hallway that will take us to the airport proper:This reminds me of one last pin story. A few days ago in Cortina, an older Italian man came up to me and asked about all of my pins. I told him that this was our 15th Olympics and that pins are a way for me to meet people from all over the world. He reached into his pocket and handed me this pin and asks to shake my hand:
He didn't really want to trade, but he took one of my pins and I walked away. Two days later, the same guy comes up to me, looks at my vest and says that he doesn't see the pin that he gave me. He said that the pin was special to him because he works at the airport and he wanted me to have it. He was relieved when I told him that if I had left it on vest, someone would have wanted to trade for it, so I set it aside. Now that we have seen the airport, we understand. It really is a nice airport, and he has a right to be proud of it.
The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. Having to take my boots off to go through security was a pain. It was doubly a pain when we had to go through security again in London. We had a chance to grab a sandwich in London before we boarded our 11.5 hr flight to San Francisco. Our Boeing 777 has mostly 3-4-3 seating in Economy, but we were pleased to find out when we checked in that the last 3 rows are 2-4-2. We were able to get seats in the second of these rows so that my aisle seat had a lot of space in the aisle in front of me behind the last row of 3 on the side seating. This meant that I could stretch my right leg out as much as I wanted and that Beth could lean against the bulkhead instead of being in a middle seat. Win, win!
Going westbound always seems easier on our bodies than going eastbound. Maybe it is just easier for people to stretch a day than it is to squash one. Our flight took us over the Robie ancestral home of Castle Donington in Leicestershire, England then over Scotland, just south of Iceland, over southern Greenland (spoiler alert to Trump - it is not green down there!), Hudson Bay and Saskatoon before crossing the US border into Idaho and down into the Bay Area. We were a little worried that customs would be backed up due to the partial government shutdown, but we breezed through, caught an Uber and arrived home in time to have ice cream (in lieu of gelato) before going to bed. It has been a great trip!
Thank you for sticking with this blog until the end (I hope that there are at least a few of you!). I hope that you have enjoyed reading our adventures and maybe I even convinced a couple of you that it might be fun to go to the Olympics. Feel free to drop a comment at the bottom and tell me what you liked and didn't like. You will also find a whole series of these blogs from previous Olympics if you are really gluttons for punishment. Right now (subject to our new war), we are planning on going to Turkey in October and I plan to write a blog about that trip although it may not be in anything close to real time and I certainly plan to blog on our trip to Los Angeles for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games. I hope that you will follow along!
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