Our travel day started with a 7:30 shuttle ride to the Venice airport. All eight of us took the same shuttle, even though our flight times were an hour apart (the front desk clerk thought the Virginians, traveling with baby R, might need a bit more time to get checked in and through security). Once we were all at the gates, we met up for breakfast and visiting, including R's first gelato (he didn't like it, but we suspect he was too tired to appreciate it).
At the same time my trio's gate came up for boarding, the Virginians saw that their flight to Frankfurt had been delayed 45 minutes. They only had 75 minutes of layover to begin with, so they got concerned. We boarded our flight for Zurich and saw the morning break over the Dolomites.
We had a brief layover in Zurich, long enough for lunch, potty, and traversing the airport from one gate to another. The mountains in the distance sure were beautiful though.
Before our flight home took off, we got word that the Virginians had made it to Frankfurt and it looked like they'd make their flight to Newark. Phew!
The flight from Zurich to LAX was uneventful. I watched Taken, Rogue One, Australia, half of Raging Bull (hated it), and Valkyrie, read, and cared for H. Once back at LAX, we got through passport control in 90 seconds and then took 60 minutes to get our bags. Then, we headed over to the Global Entry interview line. We hoped that the line would move quickly, but after an hour, we were less than halfway through the line, and we watched the quantity of agents taking applications drop by half, we bailed. We had already been in the airport for 3 hours, and we just wanted to get home.
The journey from the airport home was not our finest hour. We were tired, irritable, grumpy, hungry, and surly. H was the only one who didn't lose her temper. I tripped over four bags and took a faceplant in the middle of the parking garage. We never ended up eating. We got home at around 8.30, put H to bed in her traveling clothes, and zonked out as quickly as we could.
But, our trip was less traumatizing than the Virginians', whose final connection to ORF ended up getting cancelled. They rented a car to drove home, finally crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at dawn. They're all in bed now, finally. As I write this on the morning of the 3rd, S is already up and getting ready for work.
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