Traveling is exhausting- Yes, also exciting, but the first day of a big travel day is the worst. It starts before you leave the house, remembering to pack the essentials, trying to not to overpack. Then there’s the stress of the airport: checking bags, people who don’t know how to cue or use the kiosk, dealing with long lines in security, realizing your gate is about a mile away from security. Then you sit and wait, making sure you pee before getting on the plane because it’s an 8 hour flight leaving at 6:45pm and landing in Rome at 9am, hoping you can catch some zzzzzs or you will be exhausted. Fortunately both of us slept for about 4 hours. When you land, you are so ready to get off the plane and just stand up, I pull down my backpack from the overhead compartment, then look around to see if I have all my cords, phone the last thing you want is to leave something you care about on the plane. After you stand you realize how badly you have to pee, hoping the bathroom is close with no line. But once again no line at the men’s room and 3 stalls for women, and your 4th in line. Since you don’t feel like dragging everything into there, one person watches the bags while the other pees. Now we navigate our way through, FCO, and thank god most signs are in English and Italian. We go through Passport Control and see hundreds of people in front of us, just because you had to pee. It reminded me of a Disney World line that wraps around again and again thinking that you’re almost to the end but you’re really not. But it’s a little easier- scan you passport, smile for a photo and someone stamps your passport – done. Eventually, we make it to baggage claim, I grab my bag off the belt, but don’t see moms. She heads to lost and found, no bag. I look at mom’s AirTag to see if it’s even in the building. I see it close by but I can’t get to it. Then it moves to rental car pickup, then it’s 8 miles away, 16 miles away. We find a person to talk to, we go back to our belt and find a similar bag from a person in PA. He calls them, they realize they have the wrong bag, 45 min later we have mom’s bag. At least this time it’s not her fault. He was so apologetic, and we understand because mom has stolen someone’s bag before. While we were waiting for him to return to the airport, we realized there was no way we were going to catch our train at 11:35. We wanted to change it to 12:35, but it as full. I grabbed then 1:35 tickets, not too hard.

Next we needed to find the train, from the airport to Rome Termini. Little confusing, less English, but we bought tickets, followed signs and found trains. We still didn’t know what track we were on. All of the other trains were around them were showing up with a track number so ours didn’t pop up until 10 minutes before it was going to leave. But now we have we have to walk up 2 flights of stairs with luggage. Hell no. I’m afraid mom will kill herself, so I start carrying both of them. a quarter of the way up, a nice young man asks if he can help. I couldn’t say yes fast enough. We found our coaches, drag our sorry asses onto the train with luggage, plop on our chairs and look forward to being still for a few hours.

The view from train ride from Roma to Venenzia view was beautiful. We saw mountains, vineyards, olive trees, small Italian villas. After four hours, we made it to Venice. Now we had to figure out how to get to our apartment. Our Airbnb host recommended we take a water taxi, but mom found a porter and decided this would be our best route. I had no idea, we were going to walk the whole way, which was difficult after an exhausting day. I at one point had to stop and get something to drink. My legs were done and I started to sit down and landed on the ground. Embarrassing moment nonetheless, but the waiter and a customer helped me up. Mom had no idea what happened. She and the Porter ditched me and kept going. I was clearly dehydrated. We weren’t far from our Airbnb, fortunately. We got in decided to use the dining room as a dressing room. Rooms are a little odd. You could see how old it is even the shutters open up to a small Canale. But we’re so glad to be here.We put our feet up and agreed we were not leaving again until the morning. We’re tired and this is the end of the first day of travel.

Here are a few photos from the train ride from Rome to Venice, and our walk to our Airbnb. Tomorrow is a free day, thank God. We plan on exploring Venice at our own pace.