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Well it’s certainly been an interesting week. As many of you know Susan enrolled in a professional pastry program in Florence, Italy, beginning the end of January and running for two semesters. We subsequently arranged for an apartment as well, just about a five-minute walk from school and ideally located in the historic center of the city. But she had to apply for a student visa so we hopped on a flight back to the states, and utilized the time to do so more packing up at the house, get the car serviced, and have my permanent crown put on.

Everything went well until we got to the Italian consulate the day before we were scheduled to return to Italy. We had an appointment for 11 am Friday, 18 November, and were there in plenty of time, in fact we arrived early. Susan was informed, however, that her visa application materials were insufficient, and that she needed additional documentation from the school. Naturally this was a major let down since the whole point of this trip was to apply for the visa and pick it up upon our return in late December.

So back to Italy we went on Saturday, 19 November. But the misadventures were going to stay with us.

Friends of Susan’s brother Dick and his wife Dorothy were kind enough to drive us to get the shuttle bus to Boston’s Logan airport Saturday afternoon and we had a pleasant and uneventful flight to London. We landed at about 5;30 am in very heavy fog and soon afterwards our troubles began.

We were informed upon arrival in the terminal that some flights leaving Heathrow were cancelled, ours to Rome being one of them; curiously other flights were taking off and would continue to leave all morning. Upon checking in at the flight connection desk we were told that we could take an Alitalia flight to Rome leaving at 9:35 am but they could not guarantee our bags would be with us.

OK so when was the next BA flight to Rome?

There were no available seats until the 2:15 pm flight so we took that and spent the next 8 hours, tired and weary hanging out at Heathrow, having coffee and croissant, sitting and reading, walking around and window shopping (these terminals these days are like malls), napping as best we could, having lunch compliments of BA food vouchers, and finally getting on our flight to Rome.

The flight went smoothly, we napped en route, and had an uneventful landing in Rome. We reached the baggage carousel and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited some more - well, I think you see where I'm going with this. NO BAGS!!!! We had to go to passenger assistance and fill out forms for missing bags, and, at that time, no one seemed to know exactly where they were. Many passengers were in the same boat, including a group of Italian travelers who started clapping in unison and chanting "nostri bagagli, nostri bagagli" (“our bags”) and yelling and screaming at the poor passenger assistance fellow. Needless to say, the time involved in this meant that we weren't going to get a bus or train back to Siena that evening, so we debated our course.

We ended up calling the Hotel Alpi near the Termini train station in Rome (a place I had previously researched for another stay), and they gave us a wonderful room for only 100 Euros, which is pretty darned good for Rome. We took the express train in to Termini from the airport, found the Hotel Alpi without difficulty, checked in with a pretty friendly and funny desk clerk, then proceeded to a restaurant nearby for a delicious meal of pasta, carciofi (artichoke), scamorza cheese, and local red table wine. It was a true find, being a very busy, obviously very popular trattoria with homemade pastas on the menu. We were certainly ready for bed Sunday night and slept soundly, not waking until almost 10 am Monday morning.

Once we were up and around on Monday, I called the toll free number we had been given to check on the status of the baggage, but they still didn't know exactly where things were. We decided to head back to Siena and hope our bags would be delivered in the not too distant future. We took the train back to Siena and met a lovely Italian woman with whom we chatted during our ride from Termini to Chiusi where we then changed trains to Siena.

As an aside for those of you traveling by train through Rome’s Termini station if you use the machines to get your ticket remember to count your number of tickets. They will give you a receipt AND the actual ticket itself. In our case since we had to make a connection we were supposed to have gotten three separate ticket-looking pieces of paper when in fact we only got two – they came out of the machine slowly and we probably left the actual ticket in our machine. In any case the conductor on the train took pity on us and didn’t press the matter.

Once back in Siena we had to get groceries for the week, check emails, buy some wine at our favorite local cantina, and had a light supper of fresh green beans and roasted potatoes.

We slept well Monday night, waking about 9 am Tuesday. At 2 pm we received a call from the delivery person who arrived here around 4 pm with our bags! At 11:30 that night we received another call from someone at the Pisa airport and our other two bags had just arrived and would be delivered the following day. We cannot praise the efficiency and speed with which the Italians have handled this whole thing; clearly not the case with the British in London. In any even we can only hope that the other 2 dozen or so passengers on that same flight fare as well.