Planes, Trains, and...

Our flight to Heathrow was wonderful, even if it did not include sleep.  I loved watching the Canadian prairies and what I think was the ice of Greenland from the plane.  I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I spotted Downton Abbey on our descent into London.  ;)  British Airways certainly does a nice job with their meal service, and customer service in general.   I watched three movies, the best of which was Saving Mr. Banks.  12 Years a Slave and Dallas Buyer's Club were good, but oh so hard to watch.  I had been warned that security at Heathrow was especially tight and sure enough, they didn't like my 5 oz. containers of shampoo and conditioner.  I wonder where all of that confiscated stuff goes?

We had an 8 hour layover in London and tried to sleep a bit, but there was always a lot of activity and noise around us.  We were late departing for Rome but had BA's business class, and arrived around 8 pm, catching a local train, the FL1 into Rome.  The local train is almost half the cost of the Leonardo Express train and not nearly as crowded, which was a big plus with the bikes.  And...the local train arrives at our destination just five minutes longer than the speedy train takes to get to Termini station.  The bikes?  Ay-yi-yi...I have...one pedal.  Lol...it was my fault.  Note to self:  if you are going to use a bike bag make SURE you have everything thoroughly strapped down...I had my pedals in a cup with a snap-on lid and one of them...escaped.  We were on the FL1 as far as Tiburtina station and then had to catch the underground Metro to a stop 3k away (very fun, I might add, with one pedal) from our Warm Showers host.  Sound like fun?  It gets better...at 10:30 pm...in a fair amount of traffic, Patty had a flat.  Lol...what a comedy of errors!  We met our host and stowed our stuff, and are now on our way to see the Sandman.