I’m home. My flight landed at 12:17pm and it felt great. Sure, Iowa is colder than Florence, but it’s worth it. I woke up around 10pm (Central Time) on Tuesday night to go to the airport in Florence. 50 hours of travel later and I’m home.
I was surprised how easily I made it through customs. Technically, I’m only supposed to be able to bring in 1L of alcohol into the country. I brought in three, and didn’t even get questioned since I declared them on my form. Sometimes it pays (or I guess I should say I don’t have to) when I declare things. After the forty minutes or so it took to clear customs, the rest of O’Hare was supposed to be a breeze.
Unfortunately, the entire airport was delayed. When I looked at any given screen of departures, there were a maximum of two flights actually on-time; that was out of almost 25 flights per screen! My flight was originally scheduled to leave at 8:39, then it got pushed back to 9:00 and then quickly pushed back to 10:00. When I was at the gate, the attendant announced that the plane we were taking had just lifted off from Arkansas and wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 10:21. It was looking like a long night in O’Hare. Part of me was thinking about checking if my parents would drive to Chicago to pick me up and then we could drive to Ft. Worth from there. Luckily it never came to that.
Around 9:15, the attendant came back on and told us that she was shocked. We all waited for the announcement, and when she didn’t hear a reaction from us she waited until we all did a collective gasp (it was pretty funny and kind of stress-relieving!). Somehow the flight coming in had cut over an hour off of their flight time (?!?WHAT?!?) and we were going to make our 10:00pm departure time.
To the gate crew’s credit, we were on the plane by 10:10 and making great progress. Then, once the door was shut they said it’d be another half an hour because we were near the end of list of over a dozen flights that needed to be deiced. Safety is important, so we were all fine with it (like we had a choice). Then came another delay (with us still sitting on the plane) — we were near the end of a list of planes that needed pushed out of our gate. At that point I pulled the pillow up to my face and just leaned against the window. When I woke up we were in our final approach to Des Moines and I could tell exactly where we were from the roads below. 25 minutes later and I was hugging my parents at the bottom of the stairs before the security checkpoint.
When we got home my dad noticed something sticky on his glove that had come from my luggage. At first we thought it had just been tar from the bags being dropped onto the tarmac. It definitely wasn’t that. When we got into the laundry room I noticed it all over one of my bags and opened it up. This brown liquid was coating the interior. My first fear was that it was the liter of chocolate liqueur I’d brought back. I tasted a little and realized it was one of the balsamic vinegars in that bag. Two things helped: 1) it was in another bag, so the glass didn’t spread around the bag and 2) the other balsamic in my other bag was intact. Things could have been much worse. None of the books were irreparably damaged; they’re all still readable and just need to air out.
The one book that absorbed a bunch of it was my Italian workbook. Now, whenever I read my Italian notes, I’ll not only see my handwriting and remember the sounds and meanings of the words, but also the smell of some of the foods I ate while learning them.
The sweet, candied smell is one more odd and strange way that I’ll never forget Italy or the lessons I learned there. Nevertheless, I’m home and it’s awesome.
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