Making our way home

Tuesday was a long travel day -- 

We spent Monday night at the Hilton Garden Inn -- one of the main benefits was that the hotel provided an airport shuttle. 

Our flight was to leave at 11am, and we were supposed to get there 2 hours early, so to allow for delays, we caught the 8am shuttle.

On the shuttle...

... on the shuttle.

We had thought that the shuttle would go just from the hotel to the airport, but it made a few other stops. They were announced, but not easy to understand. As we finally reached the terminal area, we clearly heard that the next stop was "Arrivals". We thought it was odd that the shuttle would stop at arrivals (where presumably new passengers would board) before letting the departure passengers get off. We tried to ask the driver if this was also the stop for Departures, but guess he didn't know any English, and we, of course, don't know Italian. The shuttle then left the airport terminal area and returned to the Hilton Garden Inn! Whoops! Glad we started early! The second time around, we knew to get off the shuttle at "Arrivals". It was still a bit of a walk to get up to the Departures level, and then to find the United check in area, but we made it in plenty of time. Then more walking to find our way through security and immigration (we never officially "entered" Italy, i.e. no stamp in our passports when we came off the cruise ship, but we did officially exit the country), through ranks and ranks of duty free shopping, to the airport train that took us to the gate area, and eventually onto our airplane.

I haven't flown internationally in a number of years, and never on United. Norwegian Cruise Lines made our flight reservations, we have no status on United, and we were booked in "Basic Economy", aka, the "you-should-be-glad-you-get-a-seat-that's-not-on-the-wing" class. When I went online to pre-reserve our seats, I found that all the seats included at our price point were already assigned, so we had to pay a little more (I think $33/seat) to get pre-reserved seats together -- middle seats in the middle of a row. (We could have not pre-reserved seats and the airline would have assigned us seats at the airport based on what was left -- and we probably would not have been sitting together.) Thankfully, the aisle seat on one side of us was not occupied (it cost more than the middle seats if we had pre-reserved it) so we ended up being able to spread out more than we were anticipating.

The entertainment options were pretty good -- there are USB outlets to plug in your own device to keep it charged, and lots of movies and TV shows and music and relaxing videos and sounds available on demand using the monitor on the seat back in front of you. The onboard entertainment even kept track of how much time was left in the flight and warned you if you were about to start a movie that you would not be able to complete in the time remaining!

About nine and a half hours later, we landed in Newark!

More walking to get to immigration...

A view of NYC out the windows as we were coming into the immigration area.

We got our passports stamped for coming into the US too, even though we did not go through immigration when leaving on the cruise ship.

Then we were routed downstairs to pick up our checked luggage, see if Customs selected us for more searching (they did not), and proceeded outside the secured area to drop our checked bags off with United. The United baggage guy said, "Your flight is at 4pm, you'd better run!!" The connection that the cruise line had booked gave us 1.5 hours between the arrival of our flight from Rome and the departure of our flight to Richmond, and, at this point, we just had about 20 minutes left before boarding of our Richmond flight. We had to go to a different terminal, which required using the airport train (thankfully we had had to use it two weeks before when we came through Newark before the cruise to get to the hotel shuttle, so it wasn't totally unknown to us). Another time through security, and then to our gate which was thankfully the closest to security. The flight had already called all groups for boarding, so we were able to get on the regional jet right away. 

Jimmy picked us up at the airport -- and just 18 hours after we got up at our hotel at the Rome Airport, we were back to Gracie and Miss Kitty in Virginia -- about midnight Rome (body clock) time. So glad to be home! Miss Kitty was very vocally glad that we were home too!

What a great trip! Highly recommend!