8/9 -- Home

Home!  Our journey back home wasn’t without one last adventure.  We left our hotel around 8:30 am for an 11:30 flight, having arranged for another van given the Rome airport’s location outside of town and the already discovered fact that our family + suitcases = too big for taxis.  We made it to the gate with time to spare (Rome’s airport is like a high end shopping mall), and Jourdan even commented on how smooth everything was.  I’m not 100% saying he jinxed us, but. . . 

We had a little more than 2 hour layover in London.  We went to the bathroom then took a bus to our next terminal (which seemed to drive forever; that must be a giant airport), then waited in the passport line, then went through security again.  Julia had forgotten a disposable water bottle in her backpack, I had a big bottle of contact solution (which is allowed in the US as a medical liquid but not in the UK apparently without a letter stating it is medically necessary), and we had pasta sauce and balsamic vinegar in the souvenir bag.  So each of these bags had to be searched and there was only one woman doing that.  The water bottle and contact lens solution got tossed.  We finally cleared security and had to repack the bags and then had to go to another line to get boarding passes because in Rome they’d only given us passes for the first flight.  Again there was only one person working and it took forever to get to the front.  By that time it was 33 minutes before our flight and there was a sign that said gates close 30 minutes before flights so I asked the lady about it and she said, “Yeah, you should just go.”  I asked if she could call the gate and tell them we were coming and she said “No, just go.”  So two adults and three kids and 5 backpacks and 2 roller bags ran as fast as we could to the gate.  We got there at exactly 30 minutes before our flight and the gate people were kind of annoyed, “We’ve been calling for you,” as if we’d been lounging around.  But, we made it, we got our boarding passes, and we got on the flight.  The rest of the trip home was notable only for us struggling to stay awake.  The last flight from Salt Lake to Billings was delayed and we got in at 1 am, 21.5 hours after our flight from Rome had taken off and after having been awake for >24 hours minus a little dozing on the plane.  That was kind of how we’d wanted it so we could get home and go to bed and sleep until mid-morning and then hopefully go to bed again tonight and fight jet lag, but we were very tired!  But we slept in our own beds which was wonderful.  When we walked through our front door, Russell said, “This is the best Airbnb place we’ve had the whole trip.”

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