At the Airport(s)
Our travel plans called for a direct flight from JFK airport in New York to Venice, but before we could do that we had to hop on a shuttle from Boston to JFK and then endure a five-hour layover before boarding our flight.
Of course there's not much to tell from a travel day. We did meet an extremely friendly cabbie on the way to Logan around noontime; he bemoaned how crowded the streets of Boston become in August due to the influx of U-Haul trucks. Lynn and I exchanged knowing glances and our upper arms thanked us for scheduling our vacation when we did. At Logan, the security checkpoint in Terminal A featured explosives-checking "puff-of-air" machines, which I had never encountered before. My favorite part was the twenty or so seconds after the machine has blown air around my body and before the door in front of me opened—I felt like an animal on exhibit in a zoo. Next time I'm in one of those machines, I'll put on some sort of show for the onlookers.
In an effort to prepare ourselves adequately for the culinary delights that awaited us in Italy, our travel day contained a lunch of a Wendy's spicy-chicken sandwhich (me) and a bag of Puffins (Lynn), followed by a dinner at Chili's.
I've got no notes from what was basically an uneventful flight in which we both managed to get a decent amount of sleep, and I only have a single photograph from the first day of our trip. But it's a photograph of which we were inordinately proud. We set ourselves a goal of packing as light as we reasonably could for the two-plus weeks we'd be in Italy, and we think we definitely succeeded. Our total baggage? Two carry-on suitcases, a backpack, and my camera case.
Next time: Our arrival in Venice: first churches, first food, and Lee learns the origins of the word ghetto and almost doesn't live to tell about it.
