Days 63 and 64 - Travelling home

The long road home

My last morning of holiday started fairly relaxed. I spent the time finalising my packing for the trip home. The time passed sufficiently quickly that it was a continuous process to when I had to leave. One important thing that I remembered to do before leaving the apartment was to prepare my phone with all the stuff I would need for the trip to the airport as my 60 days of 5G data on my SIM had run out the day before. That meant that I couldn’t load apps, etc, unless I was connected to WiFi and, for instance, the local train where I was going to have to show my pass in an app would not provide WiFi. The important point here is that I remembered before leaving the apartment!

The walk to the train station was very straightforward. I chose to take the literal high road because it would show me a little more of Rome. That worked fine except for the short walk across a park that I had to negotiate. I checked on Google Maps that I had to cross directly, which I did, and set off. The park’s walkways were all loose gravel, so I was forced to carry my two big bags (~25kg in total). That wasn’t especially daunting when I started because it was only about 150m to cross the park. However, it all went quite spectacularly wrong as the main footpath that I was following (which looked like the one I was supposed to be on) didn’t exit the park when I got across. I had climbed up a short staircase right at the end of the path to discover that there was no exit and that I was about 4 m above the road on the top of an old battlement. I look at Google Maps again. It showed me that I had not been on the right path so I had to walk about 100m along the battlement to get out. OK, off I go, still carrying my bags. I walked well past the spot I was expecting a break in the battlement wall before looking at Google Maps again. It was still insisting that I had to exit at the point I had walk past and that’s when I realised that I had walked over the top of the arched gate leading through the battlements. The only route down was a further ~200m of walking, carrying my bags. I was mostly starting to worry if I was burning too much time getting out of the park to get to the train I was booked on. I finally got through the park having carried my bags for nearly a kilometre to cover the 150m park width!

The rest of the walk was straightforward, and did afford me some lovely views across Rome. It was definitely a fairly well-to-do area. I got to the train station in plenty of time.

The view across Rome from the street that I walked to the station

Very advanced, tall trees in the park where I turned down to the station

Across the suburbs from Roma Trastevere station

I got to Rome Airport about eight hours before my flight, as planned. I had expected to be able to check in to drop off my bags and was considering buying access to one of the lounges at the airport (there’s at least four that sell casual admission) to kill the long wait in some comfort. However, Emirates wouldn’t/couldn’t check me in until four hours before my flight, so I had stay ‘land-side’ until then. So, I set up camp in a small food court-type area. I bought a light meal and set to work on a blog post. The time passed slowly, but ultimately productively as I was able to lodge the blog post and head back down to check-in. Having checked-in, I was told that I had a middle seat all the way to Sydney (21 hours of flying!). I asked to be moved to an aisle seat and got the change for the Rome—Dubai leg. However, there wasn’t anything the woman in Rome could do about the Dubai—Sydney leg. However, she said I could probably make arrangements in Dubai (I had a five hour layover in Dubai, so I would have plenty of time to make those arrangements).

Rome airport, air-side – another example of the Ikea-path duty free shopping district before the gates

Boarding for the first leg

I ‘slept’ the whole flight to Dubai. When I got there, I headed around the connections route, which involved quite a bit of walking, then a 15 minute bus ride, then some more walking. However, it led me directly up to the Emirates service counter. I waited patiently to be served to see if I could change my seat. When I was finally served (I picked the wrong service position to wait on) I was told that there were only two other seats I could be moved to, and they were both middle seats too! I asked if there were upgrade options available and was directed to another service position. When I got to him, he said that there would be upgrade options available in 20 minutes! So, I wandered off about 20m, and sat on a seat there reading until 20 minutes had passed. It turned out that I could get an upgrade to Premium Economy (and an aisle seat) for AUD800 – absolutely worth it for a 15+ hour flight! With the upgrade sorted, I was able to head to the gate for the rest of the long layover confident that the flight would be no worse than 15+ hours in a stifling steel tube would inevitably be.

Dubai Airport – A Gates terminal

A sneaky photo in the actual gate – trying to show that the space is as large as St Peter’s Basillica space (but not nearly as awe-inspiring, of course

Premium Economy on an Emirates A380

Home, sweet home

The flight was satisfactory but departed late (for airport reaasons) and consequently, when I arrived in Sydney, I was directed to ground staff to find out what they had done about my connecting flight. I had been bumped to a 10:30am flight (from an original 9:10am connection). When I got to Qantas Domestic connections, the woman put me on a 9:35am flight because me and my bags could make that flight. I ended up sitting in the gate waiting on the 9:35am flight listening to the calling my original 9:10am boarding. Anyway! The flight home from Sydney was unremarkable. My bags seemed to take forever to arrive on the carousel. There was a taxi waiting when I got there and I was home in no time.

Reflecting on the whole adventure after a couple of days at home, I think the whole thing was an unmitigated success. There weren’t really highlights, because it was all highlights. Playing golf at the home of golf on my birthday would probably have to take prize for most special moment but so many of the things I did were special. I ticked off at least six ‘bucket list’ items (St Andrews, Rhine River cruise, Colloseum, Vatican, Monaco F1 track, Pompeii and Herculaneum). Staying at Santa Margherita Ligure as a base made the whole adventure achievable and I’ve fallen in love with that gorgeous town (thank you Paola and Silvia).

Having achieved a 63-day festival to celebrate my third 21^st birthday, I don’t see myself doing that sort of adventure again – basically, it’s too long. Long travelling holidays from now on are unlikely to be more than a couple of weeks.

This will be my final post on this blog. Thanks for reading along.

Daily facts: Location: Rome; Canberra Temp: 12; 18 Weather: Mostly sunny; Sunny