Let the fun begin...

We are leaving.
It's Saturday' May 8th.

It will be a long way to Italy, spending most of our time cattled into a XL tin can, going almost 650 miles an hour, it is actually like prison, no room, uncomfortable living quarters, bad food and annoying inmates, I am sorry I meant fellow travelers.

Our first leg (4 1/2 hrs) brought us to LAX with a short layover of 2hrs.
Coffee and checking the latest results of the Giro made the wait feel short.

Next to Chicago, (3 1/2 hrs only), a little bit of dozing around, reading, more dozing.

Me I am talking about or Ken or Gene who sat in their seats unable to sleep on a plane, Julia on the other hand, just rolls up like a ball and falls to sleep instantly.

Next stop Frankfurt, Germany.
With a small detour, the ash cloud of the Island volcano was hovering over some parts of Europe again, we arrived after 8 1/2 hrs of flying time in Frankfurt, Germany.

Here, we would anticipate our first real workout, mentally and physically, before we started or cycling tour.

While checking in with a Lufthansa ticketing machine it turns our that Ken and Gene had no ticket to fly to Florence, a simple computer flaw, frustrated I decided to cut in line of about a 100 waiting passengers, using my smooth mother language to speed up the process @ the check-in counter. By now we thought we are running a little behind schedule to get to the gate.
20 minutes later we found ourself with tickets standing in a line of
gazillion other frustrated passengers going through security.
There was no way we could make it on time to our last leg to Florence.

Sometimes there is a light at the end of the tunnel, so they say, at this time we would call it "the speed of light", out of the middle of nowhere a airport personal showed up to inform us to follow him, guiding us to a different security check point reducing the wait period, with the speed of light he almost disappeared right in front of us.

Did you ever run with 4 pieces of luggage @ 10 mi/mile pace? It's not fun, not only that there was another line at the new check point, but we had to run down 4 flights of stairs crossing a tunnel and back up 4 flights, coming to the gate right at boarding time finding out that there were more stairs to go down to, catching the bus to the plane that was waiting on the tarmac, by then everybody was soaking wet from running like a mad dog.

But we finally made it, 90 minutes later we arrived at the Florence airport.