Our flight home consisted of a Sunday evening flight to Paris with an overnight stay there. Then we flew to Houston and on to Albuquerque on Monday, arriving in the late afternoon. At CDG we were treated as transit passengers, so we were relieved of going through one of the steps of security before getting on the plane. After going through the metal detectors, the security folks had another line where they were hand-checking every bag and wanding every person. When we got up to that line, something about our boarding passes looked different to the agent--probably the fact that they were printed on Alitalia card stock rather than Continental paper. They asked, and I explained, that we had checked in the night before in Rome and had stayed overnight at a hotel in Paris, but had our bags checked through so we did not have them with us. She pulled us out of the line and sent us on into the gate area without having to do the second round of hand checks.

We never got to a couple of the places we planned on seeing in Rome. Philip wanted to visit the catacombs on the Appian Way, and I wanted to go out to Ostia Antica. We will have to put those at the top of the agenda whenever we get to make our guaranteed (because of the coins in the fountain) trip back to Rome.

We are home now, but we have wonderful things to remember about visiting Italy. I have written this blog to be my memory of the trip, but I hope you have enjoyed reading it, too. Copy and paste this address into your browser to see a slide show of our trip. Turn on your speakers for a little Italian music. http://tripwow.tripadvisor.com/tripwow/ ta-0099-8948-4c14?ln