DEN -> EWR, EWR – > FCO

We land at 7:45 or 8 AM, depending on which estimate you believe. This is a long trip – two weeks. We’ll be hitting up a number of cities, none of which I plan on listing here yet. 😀

It’s about 45 minutes until we board the plane for Rome, and we just got done with the Denver to Newark leg. I have enough guilty pleasure TV downloaded to my iPad for the next 8+ hour flight, plus yarn, plus a playlist titled “plane sleep now.” Also, all of the podcasts of the EXTREMELY good “History of Rome” series. Highly recommend.

We saw the statue of liberty on our way into Newark. I’d never seen it before, not even from a plane. I can’t wait to get to Italy (gelato) and see everything, and I loved seeing Tokyo and we  will go back there for sure, plus all of the other places on our list. I’m pretty cynical about nationalist feels, but I was proud of this statue that I know is large but looked so tiny from the sky. I hope we can live up to the call we claim to give to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We may not do it perfectly, but we try.

The only regret I have right now is the decision to buy Rosetta Stone Italian at the same time I decided to go back to school full time while working full time. As a result, I know no Italian right now, except for Travis taught me at dinner last night and that was mostly what was a direct equivalent of Spanish. Yes, no, thank you, excuse me. Then again, that’s what I knew in Japan and it was fine, but then again, Italy is not Japan. 🙂

Off we go! So excited. 🙂 This is a trip I’ve wanted to take for a long time.

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UPDATE:

I don’t sleep on planes. I’d like to, but I’ve never succeeded. So after we watched two movies, Travis went to sleep and I tried to doze.

That “plane sleep now” playlist was a part of my ploy to actually sleep this time. Lots of Enya on it. My roommate freshman year of college was fixated on Enya and played it every night, so my hope was that it would trigger some pavlovian response. It didn’t, so at one point I opened up the window expecting to see clouds and ocean and stuff. Instead, I saw lights on the ground and flipped the flight map back on: we were right over Ireland.

And then I realized we would be flying right over Paris.

The remaining two hours of the trip were largely me trying to get well-framed pictures of a gradual sunrise over Europe.

And then about 30 minutes later, over Paris: 

And eventually we landed in Rome…

… and now we are off to battle the ogres of jet-lag and push through today, having gotten to where we’re staying, showered, and now in desperate need of caffeine. And possibly the Colosseum.

Oh, we took a train from the airport to the center of Rome and on the way zipped past some Roman aqueducts. Mind blown.