Challenging 1st Day…Europe Spring 2024 with Di & KK

The last 24 hours has been challenging but hilarious. Imagine if you can…. 2 old ladies running thru airports practicing our breathing😩.

Yelp, plans for this trip were made BACK IN 2020 and then Covid hit. Replanned it for 6 months later….Still Covid won. Re-planned for a year later, and we got the news that Tommie had pancreatic cancer. So last Fall, we decided to once again re-plan the exact same trip for April 1 and managed to get great
flights….Hard to do with points now days. When we realized the eclipse was April 8, Kk wanted to stay for this monumental occurrence, so guess what…we re-planned it AGAIN for April 9.

Realizing we might get in “eclipse” traffic getting to the Austin airport, we decided a room at the airport Hyatt after the eclipse… would guarantee we made our flight. Travis was kind enough to take us to the airport and keep my car the 26 days we planned to be gone.

Early to rise and shuttle over, we ended up sitting at the airport for about 4 hours …with 2 delays posted…they finally cancelled our flight to Dallas altogether. No options to make our connecting direct flight to Rome. American said we could go home and come back Thursday!!! Not sure who they thought they were dealing with…but obviously didn’t know us. We were going to Europe come hell or highwater (Yelp it was the rain that was the problem).

Using our handy app, we figured if we could get to Dallas, we could get on a flight that day. Sure enough, Iberia had a flight to Madrid and we could connect to Rome. We asked to have our luggage back and called Travis to come back to the airport and get us. KK’s bag came almost immediately, but an hour later we finally learned that the desk lady had not requested mine…just Kk’s. Finally got mine, and after we dropped Travis back home, we proceeded to drive to Dallas. My brother, DJ drove us to the airport and kept my car.

We made a 9:40 pm flight, but when we arrived in Madrid, we had a very short layover. Walking what seemed like miles, and having to go thru passport and security checks (which we both neglected to remove our water bottle so that sent us to have our bags searched🙃)…then after changing terminals …and frantically searching for the gate, we realize it is the last gate in the terminal. I can’t say we “ran” but we walked rapidly …at the highest rate of speed two elderly ladies can muster….the little man at the gate saw us huffing and puffing and waved for us to come on down. They held the plane and slammed the door as we entered. I guess our luck finally changed… Off we go to Rome! And guess what, we only lost less than a day of our trip.

This will be my 6th time in Rome, but the next 3 days will be filled with excitement as KK gets to see some of the most spectacular historical sights this amazing city has to offer.