We're home (and we've banned Alitalia from our lives for good).

Ok, so we've been home since last Wednesday but life's been a little crazy since then and I haven't had a chance to sit and write. :)

We had a little snafu (is that how you spell that?) with our flight on the way back, which has led us to declare an official boycott on Alitalia. I highly recommend you do the same thing, to avoid the stuff we had to deal with! Now, this isn't to knock Italy--of course we LOVE it there, but we experienced a seemingly typical Italian travel scenario that hopefully you can avoid. So...we show up at the airport 2 hours before our scheduled flight but, hmmmm, our flight isn't on the departures board. That's odd. After flagging down an Alitalia person, and having that person then ask 2 or 3 more people what the heck was going on, we come to discover that our 2:10pm flight doesn't exist. Yes, there was a 10:10am flight but no 2:10pm flight. And, of course, even if it did exist, we apparently didn't have tickets for it. What?? Well, remember way back to one of our first blog posts when our flight got cancelled due to weather and we had that huge debacle between Alitalia, Delta and STA travel trying to schedule another flight? Eventually we got an Alitalia official to deal with it--by cancelling our entire trip and then rescheduling it. But, as we found out when we were in the airport on our way back, she never scheduled a return flight!! Luckily, they didn't put up a fight and paid for a hotel room and meals for the night as well as a ticket for the first flight out of Rome direct to Chicago the next morning. Well, at least we got another story out of it, right? :)

So that's it for our travel stories (for now). Hopefully you had a good read and enjoyed the images that came with it. Not sure when we'll be able to take a trip like this again (Japan and Southeast Asia are high on the list) but we certainly have enough memories to sustain us until the next trip... :) Ciao!!