GETTING READY
One of the most under-rated aspects of travel is the anticipation and the planning. Hours are spent pouring over books and online sites researching locations, places to stay, and how to get there. This is when we get those ah-ha moments when one of us discovers something unique and shares it, waiting for a thumbs up or down. It's a giddy time of looking forward to new experiences of exotic cuisine, museum marvels and on this trip beaches and pools filled with sun and warm weather as a means for extending the summer well beyond the season of our Madison and New York homes.
I've been known to be a bit superstitious about many things; travel being one of them and this trip started out no differently. The night before Emmy and I were to leave Madison for New York to meet up with Rick and begin our vacation was also the first night of the NFL Sunday night football game pairing my beloved Green Bay Packers against those pesky lowly Bears. I'd invited my best friend, Jim, over to watch the game on our pretentiously oversized big screen TV. As anyone in Wisconsin will remember the first half of that game was anything but a Packer's dream scenario. It was so bad I couldn't take it. I told Jim to throw in the towel and go home and I went upstairs and watched the end of the Miss America pageant instead of the second half of the game. That only points out how hopelessly low I had gone. I pouted all night and fretted this might portend something awful about our impending trip. For a good part of the next morning I avoided all contact with any form of news thinking it could only be bad and I mean bad with a huge "B". Miracle of miracles I stopped in my tracks when I inadvertently hit the MSN button on my computer and almost had an involuntary bowel movement. The Packers and Aaron Rogers had pulled off the impossible and our trip was going to be saved. I could continue with my obsessive planning knowing that everything in the world was going to be all right.
I'm, unfortunately, a little anal about this pre-trip preparation compiling lists and writing out schedules of when we need to be where, how we intend to get there and where we can get any advantage to better seats or the coveted golden ticket to the front of the entry line. The job of head scheduler that has been bestowed on me by my partner and our daughter is a job whose mantle I wear more by default than as an honorarium. Rick and Emmy would gladly let me be the travel agent relieving them of the responsibility and also giving them the enviable positions of critics at large should anything go astray. On this trip I've managed to keep things pretty tidy with one brilliant exception. I spelled Rick's name on all of our major flights. I somehow left the "h" out of Richard. With our Virgin Atlantic and British Airways flights between Newark to Heathrow to Rome and back again you're allowed to check-in 24 hours prior to your flight. Stickler to detail that I am I had set my alarm for the exact time to the minute for checking in and sat patiently by my computer waiting to hit the entry button and begin the process. When it came to entering Rick's passport information I kept getting an error window and couldn't figure out why. That's when that damn "h" showed its hateful head and began the mad scramble of last minute phone calls to a half dozen entities to get it straightened out. Finally with the "h" added to "Ricard" changing it to "Richard" the last hurdle had been vaulted and the ticketing got done.
So here we are now on the plane from Newark and on our way to another amazing journey.
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