DAY 01: Our overnight flight.

The recaps shall start now. =) Hopefully they will slowly appear over the next week or two...

DAY 01

We left for the airport in Seattle around 8:00 am Thursday morning to catch our short, comfy flight on Alaska to SFO. Once on our KLM plane in San Fran, we sat for over an hour at the gate before we were told to deboard so they could fix an issue with the overhead speaker. At the gate check-in, we were told that making our connecting flight in Amsterdam "shouldn't be a problem" since we had over five hours of time built in for a layover.

As a precautionary measure, I called my mother during her layover in Detroit to give her detailed directions for finding our hotel in Venice. Venice isn't a good place for letting instinct guide you. Getting into the city from the airport is not a logical process. I reassured my mother before hanging up that everything should be fine and we would see them in Amsterdam.

Three and a half hours later, our plane finally left SFO. By my calculations, we would arrive into Amsterdam just as our next flight was starting to board. That is precisely what happened, but because we also had to get through immigration, the plane pulled away without us. KLM put us on another flight six hours later (!), so we found a hidden corner of the airport complete with reclining lounge chairs where we could sleep for awhile.

After our brief nap, we headed out to spend the €20 in vouchers KLM issued to us for a meal. We ended up with some of the most vile airport food possible: deep fried cheese croquettes and cafeteria style french fries. And this came after eating an unidentifiable meal of "breakfast tapas" on our overnight flight. Fortunately, the shops in Schipol Airport were less disappointing. I ended up snagging a sweet little ceramic canal house and some fun wooden shoe magnets.

After such lengthy delays, we finally pulled into Venice's Marco Polo airport at 10:30 pm. We threw our elaborate money-saving transportation plan into the lagoon, and decided to risk that our travel insurance would refund us for the spendy water taxi. We spent €95 to be quickly taken to our hotel just behind the Rialto Market. Fortunately, our mothers were there waiting for us. We hugged and shared our adventures with one another. They had gone out for a nice meal alongside the Grand Canal to celebrated Liz's birthday and rested for a bit while waiting for us to appear. We were finally in Italy!


Our disgusting KLM breakfast. It was unidentifiable and called "morning tapas".


S near our Amsterdam airport sleeping nook.


The nasty meal we wasted $30 (or 20 Euros) in vouchers on.


Us, as we finally arrived at the gate in Amsterdam where our mothers had been just 15 minutes earlier. We finally got a plane into Venice six hours later.