The Journey Ends - Stage III (in which our heroes arrive in Rome...bagless)

We arrived in Rome after many hours (ALM has it calculated out at 30 hours) having taken a shuttle and three flights. We even had a few euros to checkout a luggage cart in the baggage hall at Fiumicino. We waited for our bags, and we waited. We assured ourselves that we had plenty of time between our flights, two hours in Detroit, five hours in Amsterdam, and our bags were surely transferred with no difficulty. And we waited... Finally, we, and about half a dozen others, queued up at the "assistenza clienti" window to admit that our bags had not arrived. It went quite smoothly...except for the fact that ALM had no baggage tag.

When we checked in at DIA on Thursday morning, the ticketing agent nicely stapled our boarding passes together and stuck the bag tag on the back of the last pass in each of our stacks of tickets, while assuring us that we just needed to see the gate agent before each flight to have our seats changed so that we could sit together. And indeed this worked like a charm, we sat together on every flight. However, when the agent in Amsterdam swapped ALM's seat and took the originally boarding pass, ripping it into pieces, AMC didn't think about the little bag tag on the back.

The agent in Rome found AMC's bag in the system, although could not say for sure where it was, since there was no "forwarding message" but he could not find ALM's bag. So we dutifully described each bag, signed the papers, having been assured that our bags would be delivered to our hotel, and walked unencumbered to catch the train to Termini.






We even survived giganto-sharks...so lost luggage should be nothin'!!






Don't forget to validate your ticket! (n.b. how foot loose and fancy free we are without bags!)


Without our luggage we saved money on the taxi and walked to our hotel, the Hotel Virgilio. Thankfully the hotel is lovely and even offered to call about our bags.



We were exhausted after "the Journey" and decided to just grab some dinner at the pizzeria around the corner and go to bed. Buona notte!