After sharing a last breakfast with Kelley and Dave and their friends and family, Julie and I headed to the train station where this time we had planned in advance and had reserved seats to Rome.  No Eurostar this time, but a more conventional train which clacked at a speed that made sightseeing possible.  

We found a bullet train of sorts (the Leonardo Express) at the Roma Terminus station which took us right to the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport, where we hopped on a British Airways flight back to London.

Arriving in London at about 7:30pm, we took the Speed Link bus from Gatwick Airport to Heathrow Airport.  Once there, we got onto another bus, the Hotel Hoppa, which took us right to our hotel, Le Meridien Excelsior-Heathrow -- the first place on this trip where Julie was able to plug in her laptop, thanks to the convenient U.S. three-prong outlet provided in our room.

I took a bath and went right to sleep, while Julie downloaded all our photos to her laptop in preparation for starting the editing process of putting together this website.  A couple hours later, Julie also hit the sack, and we both slept straight through until 5:00am the next morning when we were awakened in order to get ready to go back to Heathrow to catch our flight on American Airlines back to Los Angeles.

The flight was a long, but quite comfortable, 11 1/2 hours.  Julie plugged in her laptop and, after showing me the pictures she'd taken on the trip, we watched a couple of the DVD's we'd brought with us.  The flight was extremely empty -- there was no one in any seat anywhere near us -- so Julie was able to move to a bulk head row to watch one of the movies on the flight.  She then moved back to our row and watched the first hour of another DVD before the flight attendant informed us that it was time to get ready for landing.

We quickly got through customs and hopped on a hotel bus to get back to the Marriott, where we had left Julie's car before leaving on our trip.  We then went back to Julie's house to pick up my mother . . .

After bidding farewell to Julie and my mother-in-law at their home, my mother and I headed back to Rancho Mirage.

It was a fun-filled, educational, and fattening twelve days with my daughter.  I left tissues in four cities and on trains everywhere.  I consumed about a ton of Italian and English throat lozenges and cough syrups.  But I wouldn’t trade one minute of it for a dry nose and clear lungs.  And I just have to say that I am so pleased that Kelley Swaim Keats and David Keats wanted to get married in Italy and invited Julie to come along.