Yesterday I woke up in Rome at 6:30am, had a quick breakfast at the absolutely delightful hotel my friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey had recommended to me, and then:

• walked to the Circo Massimo metro stop
• took the metro to Termini (Rome’s chief train station)
• took the Leonardo Express to Fiumicino Airport
• walked from the train into Terminal 3
• took a shuttle bus to Terminal 5
• got into a long queue to be asked questions about my visit by a security agent
• was funneled into another long queue with people who were checking bags, even though I already had my boarding pass and wasn’t checking a bag
• got into another long queue to have bags and body scanned
• got into a fourth queue to have my passport stamped
• was funneled into as fifth queue to get on another shuttle bus to take me back to Terminal 3, where I was finally dropped off near my gate
• took a ten-hour flight (complete with screaming baby) to Charlotte
• got off the plane, went through customs
• got back into the TSA security line
• walked to my gate
• took a two-hour flight to Dallas
• waited for four hours for my two-hour-delayed flight to Waco (spending some of that listening to an American Airlines employee be loudly rude to an old man in a wheelchair who had missed the last flight of the day to his destination, Madison WI)
• flew home, arriving at 11pm Texas time, which is to say, nearly 24 hours after I woke up.