Our last walk in Cannero on the beautiful empty promenade. The church bells are tolling, and it feels like they are ringing just for us, wishing us farewell. Sigh.

We linger at breakfast with Gaby and Sigis as long as we can, before finally heading upstairs to finalize our packing and make our way to Milan. A tearful farewell with promises to absolutely meet again – and this time with much less time in between – and we are off on the ring road around the Lake and to Milan with plenty of time to spare.

As we sit and wait, we see our plane is already delayed by 30 minutes. Oh crap. This will be a mad dash in Frankfurt. Sigh. As we scroll through the history, we notice this flight is always late. Double crap. Ok. Fingers crossed for the best.

We eventually do take off, 30 minutes late, and land…with less than 35 minutes to go through passport control and connect to our IAD flight in the morass of hallways and terminals that is Frankfurt airport. Oh, and to add insult to injury? We’re on a damn bus from the plane to the terminal. Move it people!

Turns out we are not alone – there are a bunch of people with close connections and the we are all as antsy as can be as the stupid bus driver just stands outside the bus, leisurely looking around to get everyone on. Move it mister! Shut the doors and let’s go!

Finally on our way and into the terminal, we are running with everyone else. We make it to passport control surprisingly quickly and are actually first in line – not looking a gift horse in the mouth. Until we get to the officer that is. He is leisurely leafing through our passports (remember we have the super sized ones with tons of extra pages – which are all virtually filled) as we tell him our plane now leaves in 15 minutes. Not helping. Then he asks us when we entered Europe. Ed and I just stare at each other. We don’t know!!!! At this point we can’t remember a date if our lives depended on it – so focused are we in getting to that damn plane. Who knows buddy? Sometime in April? Finally the dude finds the what he is looking for, stamps and hands us back our documents.

The race is on! We can’t stop now – we’ve only got 10 minutes and you know how they always close the doors early in Europe. Damn it.

Making it to the gate, the gate agent goes through our passport and boarding pass all the while we’re saying hurry, we have to make this plane, while she’s saying it’s ok, it’s ok, you’re here, you’re fine. Yeah right lady – we’ll believe that when our butts hit our seats! Thankfully, we do just that moments later. Phew. WE MADE IT!!! A sweaty mess, but we are belted into our seats!  Oh dear me…..

Adding insult to injury, I had thrown out our water thinking we had to go through security. Which we did not. So now we are thirsty sweaty messes. On top of that, they’ve obviously held the plane for us, but also for others, because after all that stress and rush and running….we’re still sitting there with no movement at all. The captain finally comes on and tells us we have a new departure time of 5:30. We obviously weren’t the last ones on. Oh, the indignity…..

But, hey, great exercise – stairs 2 at a time, basically slow jogging thru the terminals. Worked off at least one of the ravioli dinners or pizza lunches we had!!

So we sit. And you know, you keep reading all these articles about how travel is hell these days? Well, believe every single one! We are just astounded at people’s behavior in airport terminals and on planes now. You just cannot believe the people! Here we are, on the tarmac, trying to get this plane ready for take off and a bunch of passengers just won’t sit down. They are walking around, getting into their luggage. It’s astonishing. The flight attendant actually told someone that “we aren’t going anywhere until you sit down!” Sigh. Oh, and we aren’t even talking about the guy who is sitting right in front of us, sniffling and sneezing and coughing his head off – without his mask on. Oh, he has one, it’s just down around his chin. Helpful. 

Deep breath. We are on the plane. We are on our way home. We wear our masks. We make it through the 8 hour flight just fine. After all the drama, it is smooth as silk getting into IAD, heading through passport control – the Global Entry here is the easiest anywhere – literally 30 seconds at the automated machine and we’re through. We recheck our bags and are out in the ground transportation in no time waiting for the shuttle to take us to the Hyatt Place for our overnight stay.

The hotel, while about 20 minutes from the airport, is perfect. Comfy, bar downstairs, shuttles to and from the airport. It is a great way to acclimate ourselves back to Eastern Standard time and rest up a little bit before our flight back to Charlotte in the morning. Travel hell aside – it’s good to be on the very last leg of our journey.