Trip To Italy - The Journey There

Bonnegiorno! Here I am in L’Italia. We had a pretty good trip. We had a connecting flight from Pittsburgh to Chicago in the morning, and had some time to kill, so we decided to take the metro into Chicago, walk around, and have lunch there. It was pretty nice. They definitely have “The Windy City” right. The first thing that I noticed was how flat it was. Everything was in a perfect grid compared to anything I’ve seen in PA. They don’t really have any rolling hills out there.

We walked around in Chicago and saw briefly the theater district, the riverwalk, and possibly the Sears Tower (we’re pretty sure we saw it, but couldn’t distinguish it from all of the other big buildings. We ate in a small place called Potbelly Sandwich Works. I had a lunch meat sandwich wrap made fresh and some chicken noodle soup. It was very good. We didn’t have too much of a chance to look around since we only had 4 hours there, and the metro was a 45 minute drive. Fortunately, the security checkpoints didn’t take too long to get through so there was no worry of missing our flight. Travelling on a Tuesday was a great idea.

The flight wasn’t too bad for a 9 hour flight. We brought plenty of stuff to do. I had my laptop (it’s amazing how little you can do without the Internet anymore), we brought several books from the library, and Nick and Jess let us borrow their Nintendo DS’s for the trip. We played Mario Kart through the whole flight from Pittsburgh to Chicago, and played a good bit of the trip on the way to Italy.

Justin’s seat tactics worked. We ordered our tickets online, and it gave us the option to choose our seats. The plane had seating that was 2/3/2. Two seats next to each other near the window, and three seats in the very middle. All of the seats against the window were taken, so Justin took two aisle seats in the middle section in the same row that had an empty seat between us. He figured that the middle seat would likely be the last taken by anyone, so if there were vacant seats, we’d have a shot at an empty seat between us. Well, that’s exactly what happened. It made sleeping a little bit easier, but it’s still definitely hard to sleep practically sitting up.

The food wasn’t too bad either – we got beef and mashed potatoes, a small salad, a dinner roll, and a really good triple chocolate brownie. I wish I had slept more though, because we took off at 3:00 PM, and we arrived 9 hours later…at 6 in the morning in Italy. Basically, it was Daylight Savings Time, times 6. So we didn’t get much sleep before our first big day in Italy.

I have a lot to tell about already, but time is short. I still have jet lag, am exhausted from today, and have to get some work done too. I’ll try to get some pictures up for next time as well. Ciao!