Preparing for the long trip home May 23, 2008

We just got in from our nice dinner out for our last night in Rome, and in Europe. We are mutually agreed that this was the trip of a lifetime but home sounds nice. Looking forward to speaking only our natural language, seeing the friends and family we love, know and miss so much. And especially looking forward to the hopefully enthusiastic welcome home by Bosco, Sugar and Lexie – our babies!

We leave fairly early tomorrow morning from the main Rome airport but don’t get into Austin until fairly late tomorrow night. It will be a full day of security checks, gate checks, boarding and deboarding, customs and baggage claim, followed up by a nice long drive home (the first either of us has driven in two weeks).

Despite all the travel and the frustrations that naturally go along with air travel, we are very much looking forward to the comforts of home.

We can’t wait to see everyone and share our experiences, our pictures and especially C’s fantastic (and often times narrated) videos!

Ciao for now and hasta manana as well!

Love C & K

Luggage Issues Weighing Us Down April 23, 2008

It literally took me hours the other night researching on the internet to see what the luggage limitations of Vueling Airlines, the “budget” airline we are using to get from Barcelona to Paris as well as Paris to Rome, actually are. Perhaps my OCD is a factor to consider here, but that’s another story for another day!

You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is when using an English language website written by non English speaking web masters (who are notoriously bad copy writers anyway) and then trying to make sense of the dern metric system on top of that. Oh how I wish we had jumped on that metric bandwagon with everyone else so that I could have grown up using it. Instead when I see 20 km or 10 kg my mind effectively equates it all to some indiscernible, unimaginable measurement from outer space.

After extended use of online conversion calculators and travel forums I have finally discovered that although Continental Airlines (our international flight carrier) will allow us to check two bags each (weighing up to 40 lbs each) and take a carry on (weighing up to 40 lbs and 51″ L+W+H) plus a “personal item,” Vueling is not so generous. Vueling, on the other hand, limits each passenger to a single checked bag weighing no more than 20 kg (which I have calculated to be 44 lbs – yea me!) and a single carry on of up to 10 kg, or 22 lbs with max dimensions of 55 x 40 x 20. Who knows what those dimensions mean since the airline website fails to specify a unit of measure??!!

Moral of this long, drawn out story: take as little as possible and hope for the best!