By the time you are reading this I will have been in Italy for about a day! Anyways my weekend of travel started off early in the morning on Saturday. Up at 4:30am and out the door before the sun rose. I got to the airport plenty early in Des Moines with the whole place being very quiet. I met up with two other Camp Adventure people for the flight and saw one other going a different direction.
Taking off from Detroit, I had this view over the wing.
A top-down view of a large island west of Rome as we flew over it.
The first flight lasted a short hour and a half to Detroit. It was very smooth and the view out the port-hole windows was neat with towering clouds. Unfortunately, I had an aisle seat making it difficult to take photos out the window of world. Detroit would become a temporary home as I got to spend 7 hours in between flights.
About two hours into the layover a bunch more Camp Adventure people joined us. I got to pick up some food from the limited selection at the airport and got to take the next two hours chatting and making the best of our extended stay in Detroit. With 3 hours still remaining we all relaxed and played some “heads up” before departing.
To be kind, the 9 hour flight from Detroit to Rome was very tiring. I did not sleep a bit, but the bright side of it all is that I got some neat photos of sunset/stars/sunrise while enroute. Rome’s airport is a whole different kind of animal. The busses, packed terminals, different language, and the fact that some of us had to hurry to get our boarding passes after they changed gates on us made it a challenge to get through after about 48 hours with only 4 of those being with sleep.
Coming into Catania the clouds were very thick making it impossible to find Mt. Etna.
We made the flight and it went smoothly to Catania. All but one of us had our checked bags there for us, and we got a van ride to our base. My apartment here is amazing! That may be left for a separate blog post in itself! I know a little about the base, but I have a long ways to go. It is a 6 am wake up on Monday for me to make sure I can get ready and to the training before 8 am tomorrow for breakfast. Peace like a river I need some sleep!
The view out my window is awesome! this is just a quick snapshot of it. I plan to do better sometime later this week!