il nostro arrivo

We made it!  Our schedule was to fly out of San Diego at 6:55am to JFK, with a four-hour layover there before departing for Rome.  We figured the long layover would at least avoid the problem we had last year when our flight in was delayed, we missed the connection, and had to spend a day in New York.  This time our first flight got in early and the second was delayed for two hours.  So it was a looong layover in New York, until we finally arrived in Rome at 12:45 on Sept. 3.

The old saying is "every cloud has a silver lining."  Carmen's cloud is her stress fracture in her foot.  The silver lining is that she requested wheelchair service, with the result that we were whisked through check-in and security, got early boarding, and then whisked through customs in Rome.  Now, Carmen is progressing well, to the point of walking as normally as anyone can with a surgical shoe on.  For the wheelchair service, however, she put on an academy-award performance of someone who can barely walk.  Her wheelchair assistant in Rome, Alessandro, was exceptionally helpful, getting a luggage cart and maneuvering us from the plane to bag claim to customs to the rent-a-car.  Here is a picture of Carmen and our luggage with the ever-friendly, smiling, joking Alessandro (and I apologize for the bad lighting, but we were waiting for an elevator and turning everything and everyone around was not an option).

We rented a Fiat 500L, which is a lot bigger than the little Fiat 500, in which we were able to load, just barely, our six suitcases, two backpacks, and ourselves.  I quickly adjusted to Italian driving on the A1 Autostrada (someone right on your ass is telling you to move over), and two hours later exited at Incisa.  From there we followed a winding narrow road through several villages to Cellai.  The turnoff in Cellai to our place looked like a narrow driveway between two buildings.  And then it was a single lane up the hill to Villa Ciarpaglini.  I have two videos capturing our arrival that I am going to put here in an update, but I will have to upload them late tonight due to a very slow upload speed with our Internet connection here.  Stay tuned for the update!

Note on the update:  The videos will have to wait.  Our upload speed is a pathetic 0.2-0.25 Mbps and the smaller of the files did not upload overnight.  I may try to find a place I can go for faster service and will put up the videos then.  Sorry folks!