THe flight over was cramped and I had unpleasant seat mates.. but I quickly fell asleep. We got to IST around 3. We were booked on al ter flight to rome.. but There was a 5PM flight from IST to Rome. We witied in one line to see if we could go standbu on the eralier flight..w e got shittled from oen lien to another.. and they told us to run to the gate. The folks at the gate were super unhelpful and would not event talk to us about standby, even though seats were available.. ugh

THat left us with a 10 PM flight.. getting in at 11:20 to rome. too late for us to meet our driver and get to our airbnb in Abriuzzo.. (double ugh !)…

Istanbul is one of my favorite cites.. but it was too far to go into the city so we made the  best of it by wandering aroudn the vey nice istanbull ariport for what ended up being about 6 hours.  Again we camped in the very. very nice turkish air launge and ate some of the best travel food I’d ever eaten !!!!   then visited stores, galleries and even the very cool archeological musem in the instanbull airport.  

 

It was a small museum/. but it did a great job of using interactives.. like this statue with moving eyes

 

To make matters even worse.. our flight was delayed an extra one and a half hours for maintainance reasons. We finally boarted about 11pm

 

We got to Rome just after 1AM.. and walked to teh hotel that our agency had booked for us. Our dirver knew to pick us up there early the next morning. We’d already lost a day of vacation.. but we were in itlay !

We slept a couple of hours.. and woke up  ON VACATION !

Nite all, nite sam

-me