Day 0 – Travel & Arrival

We officially arrived at the villa yesterday around 4:30pm local time. It took roughly 21 hours of travel to get and we are happy to finally be here!

We had a small delay on our flight from Rome -> Boston but outside of that it was pretty uneventful. Beckett was able to sleep for 4-5 hours and Brooke slept 2-3 hours. We arrived at the airport in Rome with plenty of time for our layover, but the stress started setting in as our next flight had no gate number assigned, the phones weren’t working, and the Wi-Fi wasn’t working. We eventually figured out they don’t assign gates until ~1 hour before the flight and that we were actually in the wrong terminal.

After navigating the terminal and the world’s biggest curmudgeon at Passport control, we made it to our gate with plenty of time to spare. On our way to the gate, Jaclyn and I had a comical miscommunication about where to get breakfast which led to Brooke getting gelato at 9:30am (3:30am EST). Meanwhile Beckett could have spent hours watching the planes out the windows at the gate.

As we waited for our flight I tried to be nice and find the kids some milk (they live off it). I could only find rice milk but then I finally found a place and ordered two milks only to be handed two hot cups of frothy milk from a latte. The kids both took one sip and decided they weren’t really that thirsty…can’t win lol.

Our flight to Catania was ~1 hour and we arrived and found or luggage without issue. We walked the strangely far distance outside the airport to all the rental car offices and picked up our car. The suitcases BARELY fit in. Jaclyn had to make the 1.5 drive with her carry-on suitcase on her lap. Within 5 minutes of leaving the airport the kids both fell asleep.

After a nice drive through Sicily and some serious rally car roads, we arrived at the villa, only a few minutes after Jaclyn’s aunt/uncle who had come from Chicago. We met everyone and got situated pretty quickly. We have our own small villa on the property with the best roommate ever (Grammy). The kids immediately asked to go in the pool so we all jumped in after our long day of travel.

After the pool we had some pizza for dinner with our whole group of 15! Then we put the kids to bed and the guys stayed up for a bit to play poker. I think Brooke and Beckett were thankful to be able to sleep and didn’t make any noise all night. Beckett and I might’ve slept until 10:30am the next morning…

-Jay