Our actual 50th anniversary was September 22nd, 2017. We wanted to take a cruise to celebrate, but our calendar for the year was packed full, so we postponed our cruise plan until 2018. The cruise we (OK, Bonnie) selected was a Western Mediterranean trip - fly to Rome, cruise for ten days ending in England, then fly home to Las Vegas. Bonnie soldiered through all of the selections - flights, cruise options, shore trip options, transportation to/from flights and ship, CDC vaccination requirements - creating a coherent trip. We were prepared to encounter some bad weather, instead we had perfect weather for every day we were away from home.

Tuesday April 24, 2018
8:00 AM Diane Takes us to check in at American Airlines. After a few unkind thoughts for a recalcitrant check-in kiosk, and some help from an attendant, we have our luggage tags and boarding passes for both flights, Vegas-to-Chicago and Chicago-to-Rome. Wonderfully the bags are checked through to Rome - no suitcase-schleping in Chicago. When we arrive at Chicago we are scheduled for only a one hour "layover" between our arrival and our flight to Rome. Amazingly for Chicago, there was good weather, we arrived early, and the Rome flight departure gate is only a moderate walk from our arrival gate.  Off to Rome. The flight is scheduled for nine hours but takes us just a bit over eight hours. That amount of sitting, even in the relatively comfortable Boeing 787 Dreamliner seats, was hard on the circulation. Two meals were served, one called dinner and one called breakfast, but these had no correlation to our body clocks.