Originally posted on July 28, 2011 by Canicus

At 5:30 AM I saw Termini virtually deserted–very few people anywhere around and everything pretty much closed down. It was a 15 minute walk from my hotel to binaria 27 (the hotel is near binaria 1), where the Leonard Express was waiting for passengers—although the doors to the train were locked and the lights off. Coming into Rome twenty days ago that train was packed. But there were only a few dozen of us leaving at this hour. The train ride was pleasant as it was just getting light so I could see some of the countryside. It seemed almost as dry as Texas.

At the airport, I really had no idea where to go. I’ve never successfully managed to do boarding passes online. I’m not sure why that is, except that this time I would have had no way to actually print out the passes. I did finally locate the British Airways check-in counter. But even at that early hour, they had a long line—I suspect most of us destined to fly the 8:20 AM flight to London. It took an hour to get through that line, check my bag and get the boarding passes—although I was not assigned a seat on the London to Dallas flight. And, of course, I still had to go through airport security. Italian airport security didn’t seem as tight as that in Britain and the U.S. (Incidentally, U.S. TSA had opened my bags—my guess being that I had spare batteries for cameras, etc. and some chargers which prompted an inspection.

The flight was uneventful. British Airways did provide an envelope for the boarding passes that had instruction on what to do when I reached Heathrow. That was helpful because I had to get a seat assignment (actually a whole new boarding pass), go through security again, travel from one T1 to T5 (which involved another train ride) and then to gate C63 which, as you might guess was about as far away from the train stop as possible. I did manage to navigate with a few minutes to spare before they started loading. I was a bit concerned that my boarding pass said “INVOL UPGRADE DUE OVERSALES.” But as it turned out, that meant I had been assigned a “deluxe” seat instead of back with the peons in economy. The flight back to Dallas was uneventful.  Although it departed London at 11:40 AM and arrived in Dallas a bit after 3 PM, it was a 9+ hour flight due to the time zones.

So in Dallas, I passed through immigration quickly with my temporary passport and proceeded the long walk to the baggage area to get my suitcase.  Customs was in the middle of the baggage area. But apparently they were expecting a huge crowd. They had those roped of queue thingies four deep running the whole length back and forth from  one end of the area to the other—maybe 100 yards or so all told. But the actual line was only about 50 yards long—you had to walk 350 yards just to get to the end of the line. The result was that some folks were cutting under the ropes and, in effect, cutting into line ahead of those of us who walked the walk. One I got into line the process went quickly. I didn’t have any British cow dung on my sandals, so it was no problem.

Then a taxi ride home—apart from the airplane tickets, the most expensive travel of the whole trip.

I do speculate as to why there is so much going up (either climbing or with the aid of escalators and elevators) in order to go back down and so much going down in order to go up. Metro stations and airports seem to operate on that philosophy.

When I got home I turned on my main computer only to discover that it was 104° in Dallas and Addison. It was only 102° on my cool patio. I had turned the air-conditioning up (or is it down?) to 90 to save on electricity while gone.