I created this whole idea that in
a day, or a week, or a trip,
1% is horrible, 24% is bad, 50% is good, 24% is great, 1% is awesome.
And this really helped keep my perspective during our 33-day trip.
And that 1% horrible actually showed up on the very first day.
Italy was our first chunk and it was just Bryson and I. And I had it all planned out so that we would land, we’d have plenty of time to get to our Airbnb. It would still be daylight.
I knew how to get there on this special train in Rome and it was going to be easy.
Well, it did not go that way.
We had our 1% horrible in our first 24 hours of our trip
That first 24 hours of our trip were probably the 1% horrible of the trip. When we landed in England for our layover in London, I found out that our flight had been cancelled to get to Rome.
They did reschedule it, but we had like a four-and-a-half-hour layover.
So we weren’t going to basically land until close to midnight in Rome.
We got to Rome eventually, and I couldn’t take the special train.
We walked to this one place where supposedly we could pick up an Uber, but the Ubers never came, like they kept canceling on us and it turns out Rome is not a great place to get an Uber.
We walked back to the taxi stand. Since it was so late, it wasn’t really taxi people. I think it was like fake taxi people and the driver dropped the other two people off first.
I had texted the Airbnb people. When we got in the cab and they had assumed we’d get there, I guess about, let’s say 40 minutes later, so we didn’t get there till about an hour after I had texted them.
When we got there nobody was there waiting for us!
I tried ringing the bell and nobody was answering. So finally I called them on the WhatsApp and the person’s like
“Why are you outside?”
I’m like, “because we just got here.”
She’s like, “No, you already arrived.”
And I’m like, “No, we didn’t already arrive.”
She’s like, “Oh, hold on, I’ll send my husband.”
And so we waited and her husband showed up and he’s like, “I let the wrong people into your room.”
He had given our room to another mom and son whose flight had gotten in late. I think what had happened, this is the best we can understand it, is they arrived at the Airbnb area about the time Bryson and I were supposed to!
Listen to the episode to hear the whole story.
And here the other percentages of our trip!