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Published: October 11th 2022
My second new purse
Pic for Valerie! Taken in Rome apartment before we left for the airportDouglas Adams
And we’ve spend quite a bit of time in airports the last two days! If you read my last blog, you know we were concerned about making our standby flight from Rome to Vancouver. Spoiler alert, we missed it 😢. But, first things first, back to our last morning in Rome.
The morning started with an email from WestJet saying our flight to Rome was delayed (an hour or so). We weren’t concerned about that, since there were several flights from Calgary to Vancouver we could take (we had to connect in Calgary). As long as we made the flight from Rome to Calgary, we’d be fine. We were up, showered, breakfasted, and all packed up ready for our taxi to the airport at 10:30. Beth popped out to revisit a church she particularly liked, and while she was out she got croissants for us all for breakfast. Last breakfast of croissants for us for quite awhile! We had a comfortable private transfer for the around 45 min trip to the airport.
The security
Two sad travellers!
We weren’t able to get on the flight from Rome 😢 at the airport was quite strict, even requiring people to take off their watches (I didn’t, so was delayed a bit). We eventually got through, wandered through the duty free, and met Ross and Beth on the other side. We eventually found a place to sit down and have a bite before the flight (I had tuna and sun dried tomatoes on crostini, quite nice). Then we made our way to the gate (after being ignored by the staff in the Pandora shop - I must say, in our limited experience, sometimes customer service has been crap in Rome).
We had to wait around until all the people were boarded, before seeing if there were any seats for us. I was quite anxious waiting. There were two stragglers, who just barely made the flight, and if they were a couple of minutes later we would have been on. In the end there was one seat available, but I didn’t want to leave Susan on her own, and just couldn’t make the last second decision to go, so our checked bags were taken off, and we scrambled for what to do next. It was pretty stressful, I can tell you!
But some good lessons learned for standby travel, now I know we have to have considered things like does one of us want to take the flight if there is only one seat. Susan had looked into flying from different destinations, of course, in the days leading up to our departure from Rome and we saw the available seats dwindling. Unfortunately the next flight out from Rome wasn’t for two days (we were leaving Friday and the next flight was Sunday), and we really didn’t want to spend two more nights in Rome. I loved seeing what we saw in Rome, but we just weren’t prepared for more time there, and we both wanted to leave. The best option was flying out of London (WestJet flies out of Barcelona and Paris too but there were no seats available on those flights). So we decided to buy tickets on an EasyJet flight to London Gatwick Friday evening, then fly home on WestJet from Gatwick on Saturday. Unfortunately the cost of the standby tickets from Gatwick was WAY more than the cost of standby from Rome (we have to pay taxes and fees and the price greatly varies from country to country),
and of course we had to pay for the last minute flights to London. So maybe not the wisest choices, financially, as it turned out, but these are experiences you have to go through to learn how best to handle standby, and now we have some experience under our belts. This is the first time we haven’t been able to get on a standby flight.
Susan called the standby line to book our new tickets home, and then we checked into all the various flights on our phones, and went to pick up our bags which had been taken off the flight. It was odd going backwards through the airport! We had a couple of hours to wait before the EasyJet check-in desk opened, but once it did and we dropped our bags, things improved. We breezed through security with an odd sense of deja vu (didn’t we just do this a couple of hours ago?). We wandered around the shops, and we bought some sandwiches for the flight.
The flight from Rome to London, around 2 hr 45 minutes, was pleasant. I bought a premixed Aperol Spritz, which I had with my sandwich, and we soon landed
in London. We had looked for airport hotels before we left Rome, and considered just sleeping in the airport, but the flight to Toronto was delayed (till about noon) and we really didn’t want to sit in an airport chair all night and the next morning. We finally found a hotel close to the airport with an available room. The Travelodge was a quick taxi ride from the airport, and was exactly what we needed. We got gin and tonics from the bar, and cheese and onion crisps from the vending machine, to take to our room. It was close to midnight at this point, so we were happy to settle in. We had a good sleep, and took the hotel shuttle back to Gatwick the next morning, after a nice cup of tea in the room.
After checking our bags, we found a lounge we could use with our WestJet vouchers, and had a very pleasant couple of hours, having a nice breakfast (with sparkling wine). We even squeezed in G&Ts when I noticed the board said our flight was boarding. It seemed a bit early, but off we went. There was a very long line very slowly
Settling in for the flight to Toronto
The plane looks empty here, but it sure wasn’t! moving to the gate, so we could have spent more time at the lounge. Finally everyone was through, and we got our boarding passes. No problem getting on this flight, thankfully! We actually had great seats, aisle and aisle across from each other. We enjoyed the 7 1/2 hr flight, and we both watched quite a few movies, and I had a couple of glasses of wine.
Because the flight from London was delayed we missed our connection to Toronto, and there wasn’t room on the next flight, but we got on the following flight, at 8 pm Toronto time. This was after clearing customs, and having to go through security again, in Toronto. We got good seats again on this flight, window and aisle and nobody in the middle. We had a couple of coffees, trying to stay awake, but I did sleep a bit on the close to five hour flight. Finally we landed in Vancouver. Our good friend Alida picked us up and we were home close to midnight, feeling like zombies. We were really happy to be home and see our cat Ella, who seemed pleased to see us and was obviously well cared for
by our cat sitter Sarah. We had a good sleep last night, and today we unpacked and did laundry.
It was long road home, but we made it! I’ll do a wrap up blog of our trip in a few days. In the meantime, to all of you who followed my blog, THANK YOU so much for reading and commenting 😀.
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Tuula
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Trip
It’s been wonderful following your blog! Glad you’re both home safe and sound!