The much anticipated travel day has come and gone.  And when I say “day”, I truly mean an entire day.  It took about 24 hours to complete with little sleep.  It started at 3:45am, we showered, checked out of our stylish digs at La Quinta and headed for the airport.  We gave ourselves over 2 hours and figured it would be enough.  Mike had called and confirmed and reconfirmed our dogs and tickets and was optimistic that everything would go as planned.  I, of course knew otherwise.  We arrived at the terminal at United with the dogs and was told that we could not check them there.  Even though Mike had out his iPhone showing them that their website said “Military can check pets at the terminal”, we quickly regrouped.  I checked in all of our bags and Mike headed to the air cargo terminal to check in the dogs,  then to the rental car lot to turn in the van.  As I stressed at the gate, Mike arrived as the boys and I were walking on board.  5 minutes later and we would have boarded without him.  A little stressful, but handled.  We connected in DC with little problems, as the dogs were checked through to Munich.  Our only issue was the huge storm hitting the East Coast at the time which delayed our plane 30 minutes.  Sean refused to sleep on board and watched multiple movies, including Austin Powers. To which, he belly laughed through the entire movie and I cringed every time they said “Shag” and “Do I make you horny, baby yeah”.  That will come back to bite me at an inconvenient time for sure!  Aidan awoke and while it was dead silent decided to talk very loudly.  Aidan has a difficult time with volume control and it was amplified on the plane.  His choice topic, “lice” I kid you not.  I’m sure everyone that was awake was deeply cringing.

We arrived in Munich with only an hour until our connection.  We took a very crowded bus off the plane to the terminal. Of course, we hadn’t planned on “really” being in Germany and don’t speak any German.  This became an issue when we couldn’t find our dogs and no one was around to help us.  Literally, we couldn’t find a single airline employee anywhere and when we finally did, we were given a number to wait behind 10 other people to ask a question.  We decided to figure it out ourselves and went through customs as required.  Post-customs we had 20 minutes until our next flight and no dogs. 😦 We figured they may have come out of baggage claim so we exited the terminal.  At this point, we realized we had no chance of making our connection with the doggies.  We did find the dogs at baggage claim and quickly picked up a few carts to move their kennels around.  The boys each sat on a kennel to help weigh it down and we headed to ticketing where we could take them outside to use the bathroom.  Unfortunately, they had done much of that already inside their kennels. 😦  While I was walking them, Mike booked us on another flight 4 hours later.  And then we hung out in Munich.  We each had a coffee and I had a croissant.  Yum!  We had a few kid meltdowns and were able to recover.  Of course at this point, we had been up for more than 15 hours!  We were able to recheck the dogs 1.5 hrs before our flight and then went through security and headed to our gate a little more relaxed.  We picked up some pastries and paninis at a cafe in the terminal and before I blinked I was handed a flute of champagne to enjoy while I waited.  The man behind me asked if could have one too and the barista guy immediately said “No”, only for the lady with the beautiful eyes.  I’m not a big champagne fan, but quite enjoyed my moment with my drink. 🙂  Next to our gate, there was also a free self-serve coffee machine.  

The coffee machine had multiple options, hot chocolate, cappuccino, latte and then also “Wiener Melange.”  This truly made Sean’s day.  Mike then told Sean that melange meant “mix” in french, thus Wiener Mix.  This is gold for an 8 year old boy!  Of course we had to try some.  We think it was a mix of all, coffee, hot chocolate and water.

After our drinks and goodies, we boarded our plane and none of us remember much else.  We all crashed and woke up in Naples.

Our sponsor arrived with a van, to which we crammed us all in and were taken to our new quasi home at the hotel.  And our Italian adventure begins…