It's Happening!

Travel day today. Well, today and tomorrow.  It's going to be about 22 hours before I get to my destination.

 

Here's an update after I finally arrived:

I ran into a big delay in passport control at the Paris CDG airport.

My flight from the US got to Paris a few minutes early, but I only had a connection time of a little over an hour, and as luck would have it on that Saturday morning the French Police officers who operate the passport checking station (necessary to pass through when entering into Europe from the outside) were understaffed.  About 1000 people queued up and only 3 officers on duty.  Of course everything ran late and I missed my connection.

  

I was supposed to get to Napoli at 12noon, but I didn't get there until 7pm.

I had originally planned to take a bus downtown, the metro train out to Pozzuoli, and get a taxi in Pozzuoli for the short ride to my relative's house.  At noon this was a good scenario.  Arriving at 7pm it would have been a bad idea because by the time I would have gotten to Pozzuoli metro station (maybe even 9pm) there probably would be no taxis around (it's a quiet end of the road train station, just metro trains, and not much need for taxis there that time of night.)  So I ended up taking a taxi straight from the Napoli airport out to Pozzuoli, which has the expected disadvantage of price (Pozzuoli is outside the Napoli city limits so the metered fare is doubled).

I finally got to my destination about 8:15pm CET.

I had left my house 10:15am EST the day before, so that's only 28 hours door to door travel!

I was very tired when I arrived, as you can well imagine.