Background
“6F
Travel Club”: Eve (54, pediatrics) and Seth (55, ER/family
medicine)
Lisa (57, Domestic Goddess) and Tim (59,
orthopedics)
Wade Hodge (57, retired pharmacy tech) and Charlie
Vorndran in spirit.
The Retreat Suite class – sunset sky suite 7327 (deck 7, aft)
For the TL;DR summary
This cruise marks a number of firsts for us. It will be the longest cruise we’ve ever taken at 12 nights. It will be the first time we’ve flown in the night before the cruise boards. It will be the first ocean cruise for our friends, Lisa and Tim. It will be the first cruise we’re taking without Charlie.
We left Oklahoma City on a Saturday afternoon flight to Charlotte so I spent the afternoon on Friday packing and getting ready and finishing up on Saturday morning throwing a few more things in my bag to bring along. We had a bite to eat at the Vino Volo in OKC but our first class flight to Charlotte did include lunch – a surprisingly good beef short rib but after 2 pm which was kinda weird. We had a fairly short layover in Charlotte and then boarded our flight to London. The food in business class on American was just okay. The Latin Shaved Beef was really good but the herb roasted chicken breast was super dry.
Customs/security was straightforward at Heathrow because we were flying business class on British Airways and got to use the “Fast Track” line, which was great given our past experience, but this time we had about 3 hours before our connecting flight and got to hang out in the lounge for about 1.5 hours.
This was also the first time we were traveling with a fold-up wheelchair for Lisa. It was a good investment as some of our connections were really far apart. Tim gate-checked it during each of our flights but what we discovered was a real variation in how gate-checked items are handled. It was pretty straightforward in Charlotte – dropped off and picked up at the end of the gangway just before getting on/off the plane but in London, he was told to pick it up at “the top” which was confusing and not correct. In Rome, it was sent all the way to baggage claim.
We were traveling heavy this time around since we were going to be gone for almost 2 weeks. Seth and I each had our large Monos suitcases weighing in at between 45 and 50 pounds each. Luckily, come to find out, that the weight allowance for first class is 70 pounds – not 50. My suitcase was 50.5 at the airport even though I weighed it before we left and got 49 pounds. We also had a 3rd check-in – a large rolling duffle bag where we put all of our shoes. Shoes are so bulky so this left a reasonable amount of room in my suitcase and I didn’t have to sit on it or expand it to shut it.
We reached Rome and picked up our luggage, breezed through customs and security, and found our driver from Merkava pretty easily. We had a short hike to the car which just fit all of our suitcases, carry-ons, and the folding wheelchair. It took a while and a lot of “squeezing” to get the van to the front of our little boutique hotel. Sunday is super busy on the streets of Rome near the Trevi Fountain and it was slow going waiting for pedestrians to step aside and allow the van to pass – often having to flatten themselves against a storefront so we could squeeze by. Our flight landed in Rome right around 2 pm and we reached Harry’s Bar Trevi Hotel at around 4 pm. Check-in was pretty straight forward and our hotel rooms were very comfortable with king-sized beds. We checked out the view from the hotel’s 3rd and 4th floor terrace then had cocktails in the bar.
On the way to the hotel, our driver told us about the “best pizza in Rome” - Piccolo Buco which was just up the street from our hotel. We decided to give it a try instead of eating in the hotel restaurant because it didn’t even open for dinner until 7:30 pm. Most of the restaurants I had looked at for dinner were closed on Sundays. We walked 400 or so feet to Piccolo Buco and couldn’t figure out the sign on the door (with patrons seated inside) until we looked around and noticed the line that had formed across the street in the alley just to get into the teeny restaurant. There were probably 15 people in line already so we decided to just duck into a small Italian hole in the wall closer to the hotel.
We were seated immediately and enjoyed some wine with the fried burrata special and pizza Diavola that Seth and I shared. It was just the right amount of food.
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