Finally home

Wow what a journey we have been on! So sorry that there has been no news for the past few days. You know that cord that I described in my earlier blog about Pompeii? Well alas, the cord did not work and we did not have internet for our last 2 days in Italy. I went ahead and posted for you to see as if I were writing that day.

We are now safely home. After a full 22 hours of travel, we made it. We woke up at 6 am Tuesday morning (aka 11 pm Monday night - Texas time). We had quite an experience at the Rome airport. We went to check our bags first. Mine was right at 50 lbs (coming I was only at 46). Matt's was at 56. Gooo! What were we to do? We had to step aside to unload Matt's bag. We put a few things in our carry on and then had to throw away a few of our toiletries. But we got his in at a whopping 49 lbs.

Next we went through the security check. Both of our bags were searched. We had to take out dirty clothes and souveniers to show them what we had in our bag. Apparently they saw something that looked dangerous. haha.

We then boarded a bus and shipped over to our terminal. We got to spend this time hanging out with Dolores and Ann and well as John and Jen. The next long hours of our life were spent just sitting and waiting. It was another 2 hours before our flight left for Atlanta. Then it was a grueling 10 hour flight back. We actually landed early! This time around we watched Marley and Me, Last Chance Harvey, and Defiance.

It was so sad when we finally got served dinner. For the past 8 days, we had been dining in style. A 5 course meal at least once a day. Most of those were always for dinner. Proscutto, pasta, veal, dessert, wine, bread, salad, so on and so forth. Tonight it was a turkey and cheese sandwich. Sad day. It was official. Our vacation was over.

By the time we got to Atlanta, we went through customs and got our luggage rechecked. We said goodbye for the last time to Dolores and Ann. We miss those ladies as well as everyone else in our group. Back to the waiting game. Because of all the rain throughout the country, our flight was delayed for an hour. We were both so incredibly exhausted. I was so bad off I could still feel the motion sickness while we were sitting in the airport. I could have sworn that the entire building was moving. Matt just rolled his eyes and laughed at me because of course, it was not.

We made it back to Austin at about 9:15 pm. (Remember that we left at 11 pm the night before??) We stood with his parents waiting for our luggage. No luggage. Apparently even though we could not get on an earlier flight, our luggage could. It had made it there already and was sitting outside some office just waiting for us... I think almost laughing at us because we had to wait to come home.

But... we're here. Home at last. Hopefully sometime soon I will get the chance to post many more pictures. I will try to go back through and insert into different points in the first few blogs as I have in the more recent ones so you can see exactly what we are talking about. Aside from that I will be posting them on facebook. I believe non facebook users still may be able to view the picture albums so I will try to post the link on a new blog.

We are not sure if we will continue to blog. This was mainly set up just to keep track of our journey through Italy. But during the next few weeks will be the time that I edit our older posts with more pictures. Maybe then we will continue to chronicle our everyday lives here in the mainland!

Thank you so much for keeping up with us on this great adventure. (And now I want to bust into Steven Curtis Chapman's song "Great Adventure" for those of you who remember (my) 7th grade Vacation Bible School! lol)