Day 9 – The Return Home

Six AM comes early when you stay out late. But, our internal alarm clock wakes us up ten minutes before our wake up call. We check out and our car arrives to take us to the airport. A nice Mercedes driven by a well dressed Italian gentleman in a suit and overcoat (it will be 75 degrees today in Rome). He raced through the nearly empty streets of Rome supplying commentary in Italian on the local historical sites. He gestures with one hand and drives with the other as he goes through roundabouts at hair raising speeds. We get to the airport in record time. I guide El Beasto to check in, give the clerk our passports and put the Beast on the scale. She frowns and says the bag is overweight by 5kg. I ask if we can pay extra and she says it is 100 Euro. I take out two bottles of Primitivo and put the case back on the scale. Still over, the clerk feels sorry for us and puts the bag through.

What am I going to do with two bottles of wine? We go to the security line and I ask the guard if we can put them in our backpack. No. We have to get rid of the wine. I joke with Karen that we can sit down and drink it (at 7am). We can’t give it to someone (think about approaching a stranger in an airport and offering them a liquid) so I have no choice but to toss two bottles of the best Primitivo I have ever tasted. Going through security, I was stopped. Something in the backpack showed up on Xray. It’s embarrassing tearing apart your bag, all your dirty laundry balled up and smelly socks falling out. Finally, we find the offender. A bottle opener for the wine. The security agent inspected the opener and pronounced it “permissible.” We apologized for causing a problem. Two more passport checks and we are lined up to get on the plane and back to reality. Behind us, a gentleman in a Red Sox cap is discussing the New England Patriots. The week before, the Pats had beaten Minnesota and apparently, the Pats defense had beaten up Brett Favre pretty good. This gentleman heard that, the next day, the Vikings had released Randy Moss, recently acquired from the Patriots.