Buses & Trains & Planes & Carts & Waiting

Our One-week tour of Tuscany ended with a lovely afternoon visit and dinner in Siena. We got back to our villas in Contignano at 8:00 PM, completed our packing by stuffing our final purchases in our luggage and went to sleep both dreading and looking forward to our return to the US. The trip home after a fun vacation is always a relief as well as a source of anxiety. This return trip turned out to be more anxiety than relief.
We got an early start, leaving La Montalla at 7:00 AM. The 2-hour bus ride to Florence was uneventful and so we were all feeling pretty comfortable and secure in the notion that all would go according to plan. Not so much.
We made it thru long security lines at Amerigo Vespucci Airport and finally arrived at gate 7 for our 50-minute flight to Rome with about 1.5 hours to spare. So we made ourselves comfortable and enjoyed some reminiscing about the highlights of our week. Before we knew it, it was 11:00 and we were beginning to wonder when they would announce the boarding time for our 11:30 flight to Rome. They didn"t. We waited some more. Finally at 11:40 an airline representative told us that due to high winds the plane that was to take us to Rome could not land in Florence and was deverted to Pisa.
So we wait for them to load our luggage onto 2 buses for a "quick" one hour and 15 minute bus ride to Pisa to catch our 11:30 flight to Rome.
We arrived in Pisa and had to wait in even longer security lines so we could be loaded onto a bus that would take us to the plane that would take us to Rome for our 2:30 flight to JFK. The bus got us to the plane at about 2:10, we waited on the plane till about 2:55 and began our 50 minute flight from Pisa to Rome for our 2:30 flight to JFK. We arrived in Rome at about 3:40 and were met by 2 attendants who were to walk us through endless terminals to catch our 2:30 flight which was waiting for us.
Most of the group followed one attendant but Peter and I brought up the rear with Peggy and her mom, Mary who with the help of her cane, was struggling to keep up. We walked through more endless terminals at Mary's pace until our escort got the four of us a golf cart for 3 which we piled into like so many college kids in a telephone booth challenge.
We rode the golf cart through still more endless terminals to the tram stop to board the tram at 4:00 to take us to our 2:30 flight from Rome to JFK. We thanked our escort and offered him a gratuity which he graciously refused stating that..."it's not over yet!"
We boarded the tram which wizzed us between endless terminals finally to arrive at gate 9 at 4:15 to board our 2:30 flight to JFK.
We took off promptly at 4:30.

Arrivederci Roma!