Our Holy Land/Mediterranean cruise is underway! We’re spending the first three days in Rome, then heading to the ship on Saturday. Here’s our itinerary on the Pacific Princess:

You’ve heard the expression “Getting there is half the fun?”  Don’t you believe it.

Our first flight left Austin almost two hours late due to weather in the Chicagoland area. This was no cause for concern because we already had a three-hour sit built in between flights. My former flight attendant memories are still fresh when it comes to stormy May months flying in and out of O’Hare.

So we landed in Chicago with plenty of time to spare. The plane taxied past the United Airlines stronghold at Terminal 1, our first time there since I stopped flying in 2001. Imagine my surprise when I saw that UAL still has not completed re-painting the fleet, a project begun at the end of the last century! So how they can afford to buy Continental when they can’t even afford to finishing painting their own planes? I guess they can say the painting only gets done during heavy maintenance rotation, but shouldn’t every aircraft have rotated in at least once since they re-designed the color scheme back in the 1990s? Very strange…

But we are travelling on American Airlines and, standardized fleet colors aside, I can report that their airplanes are not any better on the inside than I remember with the competition. The 767-300 we took from Chicago to Rome was beyond miserable. Interior by Marquis de Sade? Completely full with 200 or so very nice passengers and flight attendants, the flight was basically stinky lavs, torturously cramped seats, overhead lights that wouldn’t turn off during an all-night flight, etc.

But we’re here in Roma, jet-lagged but happy, and will spend three days trying to see interior design through Roman eyes (as soon as our tired red ones clear up a bit). Buon giorno e buona sera!