The Longest Plane Ride of My Life

I’ve never tried to make this look easy. If you’ve been following along you know I don’t sugarcoat the travel. Some days are brutal. Some days go better than I expected. But it is never easy, not once, not one leg of one trip. It is always hard. The only variable is how hard.

And our kids aren’t some special breed built for this. They’re normal kids. They melt down, they scream, they blow out diapers at 35,000 feet like anyone else’s. The travel isn’t a talent we have, it’s a cost we pay, and most days that cost is manageable enough that you’d never know what it took to get us there.

This was not one of those days. This one came due all at once.

We left Pistoia Sunday at 7am for a 1:30pm flight out of Rome. It’s a three and a half hour drive to FCO which would get us there around three hours before the flight. Somebody had told me to leave at 4am and I could not fathom it, so I split the difference in my head and decided six and a half was plenty. I stand by that.

What I was actually losing sleep over wasn’t the timing, it was getting out of the piazza. We’re right on Piazza Duomo, inside the ZTL (pedestrian only zone), so cars aren’t supposed to come in unless they have a special permit. And we are not a small operation. Six checked bags, a stroller, car seats, four kids, and a pile of carry-ons. All I could picture was the driver stuck at some barrier and the six of us walking every bit of that across the square, a few blocks down the road. Then, because the universe has a sense of humor, they started building a stage for a music festival right in front of our building, and a marathon was also kicking off in the piazza that same morning. Chris went down at 6 to see how bad it was and came back up just saying it’s already filling up with runners, we need to go.

The driver got there at 6:30, early, same energy. We have to leave now, before the street closes. So we did. Everything got loaded, nobody carried a bag across the piazza, and we were out before 7. That was our first win of the day. For about three hours, life was good. No traffic the whole way to Rome, which was the thing I’d been pretty nervous about. Check-in was easy. Security and the whole EES situation everyone online has been losing their minds over took maybe an hour and a half, no real lines, just an endless number of steps. I kept waiting for the day to turn and it just wouldn’t.

Then we tried the lounge and it was full, “come back in two hours”, which we didn’t have. So we started walking. Looking for food, looking for our gate, ending up in a terminal that was hot and had nothing, then finding out we had to take a bus to a whole different terminal. Got on the bus, hoped for the best, and the one we landed at was actually newer and had air conditioning and food. Small comeback. We ate, we cooled off, and we got ready to board. 

Getting on the plane is always chaotic. We try to make it to the front of the line because if anyone “needs more time to board”, it’s us. Kids are hyped up. We have the stroller to breakdown at the end of the jetbridge. Chris inevitably has one carseat on his head and one in his hands. Luckily a flight attendant followed behind us picking up everything in our wake. We found our seats in the back of the plane, three and three this time, both windows one in front of the other. Last time we were split two and four in the very back, which was not ideal and everyone was less contained. We took off right on time. I remember thinking we were going to be fine.

We were not going to be fine.

The first hour of that flight felt like a thousand years. At one point Chris and I just looked at each other, like, “that was one hour?!” We had nine more. The baby is a year and a half and he started up almost immediately, not even crying… screeching, for sport, and he did not stop for seven hours. I had counted on him napping since we took off past his nap time. He had other plans. Somewhere in the middle of all this we had three blowouts between the little two, and the four year old peed straight through his pull-up, and I went through every backup outfit I’d packed, which thank God was a lot.

The older two saved whatever was left of me. The two year old was mostly fine, just some minor meltdowns. The four and five year old were superstars, tablets on, snacks in hand, didn’t make a sound. All the chaos was coming from one very small person. I kept thinking after, if we had just this one kid, it still would have been ALMOST as hard. 

With about three hours to go, the baby finally passed out and I let myself believe it was over. Twenty minutes later he woke up screaming like something was seriously wrong, and nothing I did touched it. I’d been so determined not to take him out of his car seat (except for diaper changes), both because once they’re out they don’t go back in and because I had paid for a whole seat specifically so I would not be holding a baby for ten hours. I held the baby. He’d doze on me, wake up screaming, and I finally handed him off to Chris, who got him down for the last hour.

Then we landed, and he woke up crying all over again, and I thought okay, we’re here, that’s the worst of it. And then the gate was full. So we sat on the runway for another thirty minutes. That’s the part that almost broke me, because I had already crossed the finish line in my head and someone moved it.

Getting off was a whole thing. The 4 yo and 2 yo had finally fallen asleep in the last 45 minutes, so of course we had to wake them, and they were furious about it. Everybody crying, everybody done, midnight in Italy, 6pm in Charlotte, and the flight attendants ended up helping us off because not one of my children would carry a thing or move on their own.

And then, right when I had nothing left, the day quietly gave a little back. Customs was empty. Our ride was already waiting, so we only stood at pickup for five or ten minutes. The drive home was two hours, no traffic on a Sunday night, Chris flooring it to get us home. We were maybe thirty minutes out when I heard it in the back. The baby had thrown up all over himself and his car seat. I cleaned up what I could, but we were so close that there was nothing to do but keep going and pretend we didn’t smell it.

We got home and everyone went straight to bed. That was it. No unpacking, no talking about it, just bed.

**The good:** on time, no delays, Rome airport was fine, no traffic on either drive, everyone home in one piece.

**The bad:** three blowouts, one very wet useless pull-up, throwing up, seven hours of screaming, and more dirty looks than I could count.

The ugly puke filled carseat sitting outside all night. 

We fly again in less than two weeks. Buckle up.