Why, you may ask, at such an unearthly time when our flight was at 09:35 and Heathrow is a mere 30 minutes away by car?
Well, I'd been reliably informed by Paul, a friend of mine who works at Heathrow, that the queues were manic and that we'd be better off getting there three hours before the flight rather than the recommended two and the other half needed time to wash her hair! *grin*
Thankfully the mini-cab driver that I'd booked a few days earlier turned up though was less than impressed when we made him wait fifteen minutes and scowled silently at us through the entire journey. We were in good spirits though, made it to the airport quickly and then found a mammoth queue of one person in front of us at the check-in! Thanks Paul!
Then we got a shock when the other half put her bag on to be weighed and it was 31 kilos, a whole 11 kilos overweight! But the check-in attendant seemed to be in a good mood, probably because she hadn't had to start dealing with harassed, late running, long queuing passengers so far that morning and she let it go by even pointing to the +1 and saying, with a grin on her face in a nice Italian accent, "I bet that that is your bag?", "You realise that you will not be able to buy anything out there as they will make you pay much on the way back?"
Being so early also meant that we got through passport control quickly and managed to have a nice breakfast before the crowds arrived.
The journey after this also went smoothly with only the inconvenience of having to wait almost an hour and a half for our luggage at the other end, almost as long as our flight had been!
I'd arranged for a driver to pick us up at the airport as that had been a surprisingly cheap thing to do and we were thankful for the air conditioned car that drove us off into the city as the temperature in Rome was roastingly hot.
The driver had a friendly nature but didn't speak a word of English. Just before we headed off he fumbled in his glove compartment, got out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote three numbers onto it in a triangular formation: 5, 8 and 7 and then started speaking to us in Italian, obviously trying to explain something.
We looked on bemused and I wondered if this was some weird type of maths geometry puzzle or Da Vinci code that we had to solve before we could leave.
Then he started making circular motions and "brum brum" noises and mimed a steering wheel at us when the penny finally dropped and we realised that he was confirming our return time as 7am on the 5th of the 8th!
"Si, si", I replied to confirm that we had understood and with a wide grin and a relieved look on his face we started out.
The hotel was lovely and I almost jumped with joy when I saw our room. Last year's long weekend Christmas shopping trip to New York that had cost me an arm and a leg had ended up with us having a rather underwhelmingly small room. But here in Rome we had a beautifully large, air conditioned room at the end of a corridor with huge windows from which we could see the Pantheon, a lovely rustic red beamed ceiling and a huge queen-sized bed.
It was heaven!
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