Italia Julia & Nicole Style: Part Sette: All Roads Lead to Rome

It was about that time for Julia and Nicole to head back to convenient, simple, real life Santa Barbara. As they contemplated about how and when to get back to Rome (spending the night in the airport, taxi to airport, bus or train, etc, etc.???) I sensed their anxiety and understood it well. Together, we decided that the best plan would be for me to drive them to Rome. Their flight was early morning and Rome is 3 hours from Siena, so we left at 1:00 am and away we went. But of course…we had to have one more little adventure…so the good thing is that there was no traffic because it was 1:00 am. I was advised by my friends Mauro and Sabrina to take an alternative route that would bypass the freeway and take me directly to the airport. All was dandy, but that one single moment that I chose to look down, I missed the sign for an exit…well, no worries, it deterred us for about 15 minutes, but it was still a little frustrating…if you can believe this, we actually ended up at the naval port. When we drove into a gate, which looked like a toll, a man was standing there. We saw ships…hmmmm….that’s funny…shouldn’t we be seeing planes? I asked, “How do I get to the airport.”…Lost in translation, the man thought I said, “Is this the airport?” Silly man laughed at us…then we drove around a bit…found our way back to the correct highway and off we were to the airport.

Almost there and arriving quite early I must say (3 hours before the flight), we finally get to the toll that we were expecting. Well, tolls make me nervous…they are a source of anxiety to me (I don’t know why)…so it really freaked me out (and it didn’t help that I am exhausted at this point) when after passing through the toll, we were signaled by a policeman on foot to pull over. Panic set in, “Shit…what’s wrong…what did I do…was I speeding…are there drugs in the car…have I gone past the 3 months stay in Italy…will we all go to jail before Julia and Nicole can catch their flight?” Well, this is the mind chatter of someone who is tired and has anxiety! Well, there was no problem other than my brights were on…the cop was clearly more interested in the passengers if you know what I mean and the whole time he is talking I am thinking “Is this guy for real…is this cop actually trying to make conversation with us?” Finally he waived us on. Well, we get to the airport and as we are getting the bags out, the same cop car drives by and now he is with another cop and they stop…asking more questions…unnecessary questions….I was perplexed and felt like I had to answer the questions, but my gut knew this joker was bored at 4 am and wanted to get his flirt on. Finally he left us be again…only after he found out who we all were and where we lived.

I said good-bye to Julia and Nicole … and I was sad, but so happy about our newly defined, expanded friendship. I drove back to Tocchi and was happy to catch the sunrise on the way home.