Roman Holiday, Part 14: We Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Lives, Already in Progress

When we got back to Our Little Town it was sleeting, which seemed unnecessarily harsh after a week in Rome. Oh well. It provided a clear break between vacation and reality, so perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing.

Getting home was a bit of an adventure. There’s a whole lot of new rules and regulations regarding traveling in the pandemic here in the Land of the Free and they change on an hourly basis. Why anyone thought putting the airlines – corporations renowned for their inability to grasp the concept of customer service or even reliable phone lines – in charge of enforcing such things is a mystery for the ages.

One thing we knew we had to do was get a covid test. Fortunately these are pretty easy to come by in Rome. Italy has (or at least had at the time) a Green Pass system whereby all Italians have a QR code that links to their vaccination and testing records so you can get tested at pretty much any pharmacy. There was one just down the street from our apartment, right by one of the bus stops that we frequented. We’d stopped there earlier in the week to get sunscreen for Kim (it was very good sunscreen, it turned out) and we determined that they would do testing on Thursday morning. You have to have it done within 24 hours of departure and since we were leaving on Friday morning that worked out just fine.

So that morning we headed over to the pharmacy.

They’d set up that little pop-up tent in the street, away from the customers inside in case you test positive, and eventually we figured out that we just had to sign up for a slot out there and wait to be called in. Once the test was over we went inside the pharmacy to collect our official EU Test Result Confirmation, which we immediately photographed for backup and then tucked safely away, paid our pile of euros, and went to lunch at the Testaccio Market to celebrate.

The only fly in this ointment was that we were completely unable to check in ahead of time with the airline. We tried several times, both online and by phone, and eventually the second person we spoke to at the airline managed to get through the process without hanging up on us and then sadly told us that it was not possible for us to check in for our flights in advance and we’d have to do that at the airport.

Thanks.

There was also the matter of the Attestation Form.

This is a 7pp form that the US Government has so you can swear that you’re vaccinated against covid. The airline insisted that this was absolutely necessary – they wouldn’t even let us onto the plane without it – and it had to be printed. They would not accept any electronic version of it. Air B&Bs rarely come with printers, it turns out. Eventually we called the US Embassy and they said to forget about it, but – as Kim will tell you – I am not the most relaxed of travelers when it comes to all the prep work one needs to do before actually setting foot on the plane (which is why she handles all this) and in order for me to get any sleep at all that night we asked our Air B&B host to recommend a print shop. Fortunately there was one about a block away, so I emailed both of our completed forms to myself, hiked over, emailed them to the guy behind the counter, and walked out with printed copies for wholly a nominal fee.

They never did ask for the forms – the Embassy was right – but I felt immensely better anyway.

We were up at 4:30am on Friday to get to the airport, since it was an early flight and you have to plan ahead for these sorts of things. Kim had found an Uber driver who would take us to the airport at that unholy hour – the first car we’d been in since we arrived in Italy – and he showed up a few minutes before 5am. Fortunately we were able to get to him, as we’d forgotten that the courtyard for our apartment has locked gates and we’d had to leave the keys in the apartment and lock the door behind us. There was a heart stopping moment when we considered the possibility of being trapped in the courtyard until someone came by to rescue us, but one of the gates was open so WIN.

The airport was fine. They checked us in though to Chicago with no problems, though they did demand our carry-on bags again as they were too heavy for the overhead bins. The advantage to this, we discovered, is that they do this for free. Thus unencumbered, we stopped at a coffee place, and then slowly made our way through security and into the Duty Free Shopping area to scan through the offerings. Eventually we got on the plane and took off, waving goodbye to Italy as it receded into the distance.

The airport in Frankfurt, Germany, is one of the stranger airports I’ve been in, mostly because you don’t really taxi up to the gate when you land and you don’t leave from the gate when you take off. Instead when you get there you pull up somewhere out on the tarmac and then get onto a bus which takes you to the terminal – a ten to fifteen minute ride – and when you leave the process is reversed. This is why the announced boarding times at Frankfurt are so far in advance of the actual departure times – they have to get you through all of the intermediary steps.

We got there just fine and then launched our expedition from A Terminal where we landed to Z Terminal where we were departing from, which was just as long of a trek as you’d imagine given that set up. Fortunately we had plenty of time, which we spent getting registered with our next airline (why can’t flights just be one airline anymore?) and finding some lunch, along with a nice break in some very comfortable chairs. If you’re going to be there for a few hours you might as well enjoy it.

My favorite thing about Frankfurt was that they have racks and racks of free newspapers and magazines for you to read while you wait. This is how I stumbled across what might possibly be my favorite movie review of all time. It was in The Financial Times, which is not generally reckoned a source of entertainment news, and it was for the action film Ambulance, which briefly set sail for glory sometime in mid-March and then promptly sank like a stone. The reviewer was rather ambivalent about the film, it seems.

“Picture a 10-year-old boy of vivid imagination but limited attention span,” the review begins, “often needing reminding to use his indoor voice. (Let’s call him ‘Mike’.) Now hand him the run of Downtown L.A., millions of dollars, many energy drinks and very good insurance. The outcome would surely look like Ambulance, the berserk new action thriller from director Michael Bey. Don’t take that as an insult. Countless great films have been made by overgrown 10-year-olds. While Ambulance isn’t one of them, it is fully committed to your entertainment.”

It takes real skill to twist the knife like that.

Our flight to Chicago was absolutely glorious. We had a big, relatively new plane and it was about a third full – the first time I have flown on a plane with any empty seats since the 1990s. Kim and I got an entire 3-seat middle section to ourselves and spread out. All flights should be like this.

Eventually we made it home, unpacked, and collapsed in a heap in our own bed. It’s good to travel, but it’s also good to be home.

A few days later I found a 2-euro coin still in my bag while I was at work. I keep it on my desk now, as a reminder of a lovely time.

I still haven’t seen the movie Roman Holiday, though. Perhaps someday.