My flight is booked!

My travel itinerary is updated and so is my countdown timer.

Flights and Itinerarires

Flying standby is a blessing and an adventure in itself, but it's also a pain in the neck. Unlike most travelers, who book their tickets months in advance and turn their attention to more interesting details, my sister and I have to stay abreast of our desired flight's status. We began long ago by checking the number of seats available on a typical weekday flight from Orlando to Rome. Clearly, standby travel is easier during the week, since weekends are popular travel days. After that, we chose a tentative date and periodically checked the remaining seats on the flight as well as the list of other standby passengers hoping to catch a cheap flight across the Atlantic. Now that there's only about a week before we plan to leave, the numbers are entering that point beyond which they will probably not change, so tonight or tomorrow we will "officially" reserve our seats.

It just so happens there's only one flight a day from Orlando to Rome (direct) and it leaves at night. This will put us in the air, soundly sleeping at night (when we SHOULD be sleeping), and on the ground in Italy sometime the next morning. Perfect, right? Hopefully, we'll make our flight... There's always a risk with standby.

I've been working on my tentative itinerary recently. I don't taking immaculately planned vacations, with every moment booked and a constant reminder of the time. However, this is a big opportunity, one I can't easily relive, so I'm hoping to make the most of my time. Unfortunately, as an art history buff, I'd love to hop into every nook and cranny in the ancient city of Rome, and I'm having trouble fitting even the "big-deal" stuff into our expected 4.5-day holiday. As I solidify this itinerary in the next couple of days, I will post it here, so you can all be sufficiently jealous, possibly with mouth agape ("He's going to do ALL of that in ONE DAY?").

Making Preparations

Since this is my birthday present from my sister and parents, they have promised to take care of the gory details like lodging, transportation and meals. I love adventures, I love new things, and I love trips, but I hate planning all the details. In general, I prefer to push off into the wild with the intention to take care of those things when it becomes necessary.

Without any details to plan, though, I've been left plenty of time to plan the fun stuff. Where to go? What to do? Which monuments to see and which museums to visit? The more I research and solicit advice, the larger my Google map grows. At this point, I'm dubious we will see it all. However, in my quest for the less-beaten path, the sideshows that most people miss, I've been perusing travel review sites, like TripAdvisor, searching for travel blogs by other adventurous individuals, and devouring travel books when I have the time to go to a book store.

On top of that, I bought a pocket-size Italian-English English-Italian dictionary from Amazon a couple of days ago, and I eagerly await its arrival. I took Italian for two years in high school and, only about a year ago, listened to a set of Italian learning CDs set to music. The high school courses are mostly rubbish on the shoulder of my mental highway, aside from basic grammar and some vocabulary I found particularly beautiful, but the learning discs were hilarious. They seemed to have stuck quite well with me, as I still find myself humming the music for "I'd like one ticket please - Vorrei un bigliette per favore." (Yes, I wrote that without looking anything up.)

Because my sister and I are flying standby (we get such cheap tickets that way!), I'm a little nervous about the singular adventure offered by airline (over)booking. We may get on, we may not. We may find ourselves in the airport, sleeping on our balled up sweaters. Or, if we're lucky, we may find ourselves in two vacant first-class seats, sipping cocktails and slicing steaks the whole way to Rome. Only time will tell...