Galley Gossip: Packing Light – Rome, Italy

by Heather Poole on

“Okay,” said the husband, shoving his cell phone into the back pocket of his blue jeans. People, all of them very fashionably dressed, whizzed by us while we stood on the cobblestone street outside a large glass window displaying freshly baked pizza. We had just exited the train station in Rome and were looking for our hotel, The Gregoriana. “The guy said to walk up the Spanish Steps, turn right, and the hotel is at the end of the block.”

“At least we’re close,” I said, eyeing a slice of pizza. It looked amazing. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one.

Sighing, the husband grabbed his black rolling bag, slung a backpack over his shoulder, and said. “So…any idea how many steps there are?”

“A lot,” I said with a laugh. Though I did not know the exact amount of steps (I do now), I had an idea there would be more than we’d like.

We turned a corner, walked a good ten feet, all the while taking in the history and beauty that surrounded us, and five seconds later found ourselves standing at the foot of the steps. “Oh. My. God,” said the husband.

“Good thing we packed light,” I said, and meant it, because we had, in fact, packed light, very very light for a ten day trip to Italy. And then I laughed, because all I could do was laugh, as I took in ALL THOSE steps, as well as all those people sitting on the steps. There were well over a hundred – People and steps! I’m not sure which frightened me more -the people or the steps!

One thing a flight attendant knows how to do is pack light. We do it every day. My secret to packing light, wearing only black, white, and brown, along with a couple colorful accessories. That way everything goes with everything else, creating several mix and match outfits from just a couple basic pieces. Of course, the other secret is to roll your clothes, not fold.

“Roll them military style,” advised Dee, a flight attendant I worked with from Dallas to La Guardia a few months ago after I told her I was going to Italy for ten days and would only be taking along my flight bag. “You can get more in the bag that way.”

I’m not sure what she meant by military style, but I figured it had something to do with rolling my clothes tight, really tight, which is exactly what I did, getting way more than I anticipated into my crew bag.

“You are not going to need all that,” said the husband, as he watched me on the floor from the bed.

“You don’t know that,” I said, as I proudly zipped up my bag – one bag. And a tote.

That was not the first time I had uttered that particular phrase, “Good thing we packed light.” Nor would it be the last. The first time I said it was in Venice. We had just arrived at our hotel in Cannaregio after walking the winding cobblestone streets for a good twenty minutes, going over bridges and across canals and through narrow alleyways, too many times to count, making our way from San Marco Plaza to Cannaregio, also known as the Jewish Ghetto. The last time I had mumbled that one particular phrase had been that very morning as we lugged our bags up the steep flight of stairs on-board the Eurostar train that would take us from Naples to Rome, after having visited Positano for a couple days, which is now one of my top five favorite places to go in the world. I do hope to make it back soon.

“Give me your bag,” ordered the husband, his eye on the prize as he wiped the sweat from his brow. We were still standing at the bottom of the Spanish Steps.

“I’ve got it!” I said, grabbing the black plastic handle of my Travelpro bag a little tighter, because I did, indeed, have it. Though at that moment I must admit that I kind of wished I did not have it, even though all I had was just a rollaboard and a small tote bag. But since I was the one who had packed it (okay fine, over-packed it!) I’d been prepared to carry it. That was only the fair thing to do.

“Give it to me!” demanded the husband, who had become, upon arriving in Italy eight days prior, very macho in the bag carrying department. Before I could resist he grabbed my bag, and with a rollaboard in each hand and a backpack over his shoulder, he began his long journey to the top of the stairs.

Behind him I followed, huffing and puffing the entire way up as I carried that one little tote-bag, which, as I took each step, began to feel not so little, along with a beautiful black leather briefcase the husband had found in a quaint little shop under a bridge in Amalfi. Together we zigzagged between all those tourists sitting on all those steps. For sure there were well over one hundred steps. I never thought we were going to make it to the top.

Finally, we dropped our bags and took a break, looking down from where we had just come, before continuing on to the hotel which was just a short block away. I’ll never forget the look on my husband’s sweaty face when the desk clerk greeted us with a curt glance and said, as his fingers typed away on a keyboard, “I forgot to tell you, there’s an elevator in the train station.”

Forgot to tell us? Yeah right.

Nor will I forget the sight of my husband as he stood, panting for air, behind a junky souvenir cart at the top of the Spanish Steps trying to catch his breath. For a good ten minutes. Maybe longer. Or course I took a picture. I’d love to share it with you, but he’d probably kill me, so you’ll just have to settle for these….

(Been to Rome? Share your favorite places to go and things to do here by posting a comment below)

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Galley Gossip: That Day – 9/11 (plus a chance to win the book Reclaiming The Sky)

by Heather Poole on

That day, September 11, 2001, was the day I landed in Zurich, Switzerland for a week long vacation with my mother who is also a flight attendant based in New York. That morning, the morning we sat on a strange bed in a hotel room far away from home, our eyes glued to the television, we watched in horror as it happened, as an airplane, one of our airplanes, carrying our fellow crew members, along with our passengers, crashed into the World Trade Center. Like you, we were stunned, and scared, and could not believe what we had just seen so far far away from home. Little did we know our lives had changed forever.

“Don’t even bother going to the airport until the 21st,” said an airline representative over the phone after I told her we were airline employees trying to use our flight passes to get out of Switzerland on a flight, any flight, to the United States.

“How much to purchase a ticket?” I asked.

“Let me see….the only seat available is on the 28th, in coach, and that costs…” I could hear her fingers clickity click click clicking, working their magic. I held my breath. “$8,000,” she finally said.

“Just keep going to the airport,” said a Delta Captain laying over at our hotel. We were in the lobby waiting to check in – again, when he spotted the red CREW bag tag wrapped around my suitcase. “We were able to get a few standbys out the other day.”

So that’s what we did, my mother and I, we woke up early each morning, checked out of the hotel, walked to the train station in a daze, our bags rolling behind us, where we boarded a train in the dark to go to the airport. Hours were spent waiting to get on one of two flights, the only two flights going to the United States. All other flights had been canceled. One flight departed early in the morning and another left later in the evening and we were number 800-and-something on the standby list. Yet we continued to go to the airport and wait it out every single day, just like thousands of other people desperate to get home to family and friends.

Eventually some passengers did leave. By car. A couple of them decided to drive to other airports in neighboring countries. A few days later they returned. My mother and I still sat waiting, waiting, waiting in the terminal with little hope of getting out any time soon.

When we did finally make it back to the United States, I found myself in Texas, where my parents live, and that’s where I decided to stay until October. The route I’d flown for two years straight, New York – Vancouver, had been wiped off my schedule the entire month of September – never to return again. Which left me with a little time off that many of my colleagues were not fortunate enough to experience. I was lucky and I knew it.

The most vivid memory I have of that time, my time in Texas, took place in a popular oyster bar. There I was catching up with an old college friend I had actually run into at the Chicago airport the day I flew to Zurich. He had been on his way to Japan. We sat at a small table discussing what had happened, and the days that followed, while the people around us ate and drank and laughed, having a grand ole time, as if nothing had happened, while a television above the bar rolled footage of the recovery process going on in New York, my crew base since 1995.

Eventually I did go back to work, back to New York, less than a month after that day in September. I’ll never forget the smell, as it lingered in the air, strange and unexplainable, for months. And whenever I’d return to my crash-pad in Queens after a flight, I’d step out of the car and onto the curb, only to be greeted by stacked cardboard moving boxes. Japan, several boxes were labeled one particular afternoon. Most likely belonging to the opera singer living at the end of my hall, because shortly after that, the hallway became eerily quiet. (I still miss her beautiful voice.) As people left New York in droves, and the odd smell refused to dissipate, my colleagues continued to go to work, back to the airport, back on the airplane, back to where it all started on that day in September.

“Remember the soot on our windows in the apartment when we got back to New York?” my mother said after I read the first part of this post to her over the phone. “And the memorials set up for our coworkers in Operations?”

As my mother reminded me of all I could not remember, of what I did not want to remember, a chill went down my spine. What I do remember was flying into New York, the airplane low over the city, the passengers glued to the windows as they looked out to where the Trade Center had been, a dark hole on the ground that continued to smolder for far too long.

“I often wondered if the pilots were tipping the wing of the airplane in the direction of where the Trade Center had been in respect to what had happened,” my mother said.

On the jump-seat I sat on my first trip back, minutes after takeoff, when the flight attendant sitting beside me asked, “What are you going to do if something happens?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing full well what he meant. It’s just I didn’t, at the time, have a plan. I mean I had a few ideas of what I could do, but I didn’t know exactly what I would do, if, in fact, it came to that. God how many times did I pray sitting on that jump-seat after takeoff that it would not come to that!

“Here’s what I’m going to do,” said the flight attendant as he motioned to the insert of soda sitting on the linoleum floor beside his jump-seat. He grabbed a can of Pepsi and made quick and aggressive throwing motions. “Bam! Bam! Bam!”

Soon after that, every flight attendant I met had some sort of plan, each plan more original and ingenious than the next. My weapon of choice, a can of soda inside a long sock that I would swing if anyone tried any funny business, I kept hidden behind the last row of seats in whatever cabin I happened to be working that day.

There were times, only a few, when strange things did happen on-board my flights, and I remember wondering if what had happened was really a “test run” for a future attack. And there were other times, only a few, when passengers would do things, very strange things, to take advantage of the situation that had developed on that horrible day. One of those times included an elderly gentleman, a Koran, a book of weapons, and an intense stare full of hatred. We, the crew, decided to ignore him.

One passenger we chose not to ignore walked on-board the aircraft – not a couple of years ago, but just last week, causing Heather, my coworker, to say, “There’s a guy seated in the first row of coach who gave me chills.” We were flying from Los Angeles to New York. “It looks like he might be traveling with three others because he keeps making eye contact with one in business class and one in the back of coach.”

Immediately I hopped off my jump-seat and made way up the aisle. The guy was young and…well…kind of odd looking and nervous acting. I asked him a random question, just to feel him out, and he answered in a way that left me feeling nothing – no chills, no sixth sense telling me to keep an eye on this guy. Who knows why Heather had felt the way she did about that guy during boarding, but for whatever reason, something made her feel that way, and I’m glad she did not discount that feeling. No one should.

Whenever I hear about an unfortunate accident involving an aircraft, I’m still taken back to that day in September. I can’t help it. Those were my airplanes. My crew members. My passengers. And yet I still go to work, because I want to go to work, because I love what I do, given all that’s changed since September 11, 2001.

The following is a quote from a flight attendant in the book, Reclaiming The Sky, by Tom Murphy, a quote I could have written myself. Reclaiming the Sky tells the personal story of several aviation employees – some who died, others whose job descriptions were transformed before their eyes, and countless more whose entire lives were forever altered on September 11th, 2001…

“It doesn’t sound like a big deal, balancing customer service and security, but the aircraft is full and people are crowding the aisle. You ask yourself, is the man lingering in the aisle suspect or merely inconsiderate? It’s two minutes to departure, we’re getting ready to close the door, and suddenly I’ll see we’re getting half a dozen late boardings – standbys and maybe a few wheelchairs. I’ll smile and find space for everyone, but over my shoulder I’ll see that passengers I’ve asked to turn off their electronic equipment continue making cell phone calls. Then someone will need to use the bathroom at the same moment an unescorted minor asks for their grandma, usually at the moment an overhead bin won’t close. Then comes an announcement from the cockpit and I’ll see the gate agent standing by the door ready to close it, with their foot tapping, which I can’t see, but I know it’s tapping…”

…And probably continues to tap, as passengers continue settling into their cramped seats, and the crew (minimum crew, mind you) continues to provide the best service they can with little to offer, and all the while fuel costs continue to rise, along with your ticket price. It’s not easy traveling today – for crew and passengers alike. Yet there we are, all of us in the flying tube together.

Tell us about your traveling experiences after 9/11, by Friday, September 12, 2008, by 5pm and you’ll have a chance to win a copy of the book Reclaiming The Sky, by Tom Murphy. Two winners will be chosen. Good luck!

  • To enter, simply leave a comment below describing a post-9/11 traveling experience.
  • The comment must be left before Friday, September 12, 2008 at 5pm Eastern time
  • You may enter only once.
  • Two winners will be selected in a random drawing.
  • Two Grand Prize Winners will receive a free copy of Reclaiming The Sky, by Tom Murphy.
  • Open to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
  • Book is valued at $21.95.
  • Click here for complete Official Rules.

This post has been dedicated to all the flight attendants who continued to work during uncertain times, flight attendants who reclaimed the sky, and to the flight attendants who lost their lives on 9/11. You are not forgotten…

Terry Thames, American Airlines pilot. This is the first AA flight returning to IAD (Washington Dulles) after the skies were reopened four days after 9/11.

Photo courtesy of Tom Murphy

Galley Gossip: Flight Attendant Pet Peeve #4 – Turn around, go that way!

by Heather Poole on

“Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard,” I say, and I say this as I’m standing between first class and coach while passengers board the airplane and slowly make their way down the aisle. That’s when I spot you standing at your row with your bag sitting on an aisle seat as you stare up at the overhead bin, a full overhead bin, and shake your head.

“Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard,” I say, as you continue staring into the full overhead bin above your seat, and as you stare, still shaking your head, I already know what you’re going to say before you even say it, and while I wait for you to say it, I continue to greet the passengers during the boarding process. “Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard.”

Though I can’t make out the words, I see you’re talking to those seated around you, pointing aggressively at your seat, at the overhead bin, back at your seat again, and as you begin to make a scene, a very loud one, you turn and look at me.

“Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard,” I say, and as I say this, I’m thinking to myself, here we go, and I’m wondering, as I’ve wondered thousands of times before, why you can’t just turn around and put the bag inside the empty overhead bin behind you, the one located three rows back. You see it. I see it. We all see it. So why don’t you use it? You can use it, ya know.

Waving your hands in the air at me, you say, “Excuse me, Miss! Can you help me!”

Of course. I slide in behind a passenger and slowly make my way down the aisle. You look very concerned, so I smile at you, but you don’t smile back. You never do. Now this is about to go one of three ways, depending on how often you fly…

YOU RARELY FLY: “There are bags in MY overhead bin!”

YOU FLY A COUPLE TIMES A YEAR: “Can you help me find a place for my bag?”

YOU’RE A FREQUENT FLIER: “Can I put my bag up there?” (pointing to first class)

ME: “I’m sorry,” I always say, no matter how often you fly, because I am, truly, sorry – sorry I have to say sorry all day long! “But you’re going to have to use the bin three rows back.” I point at the bin. “I’d grab it quick before someone else does.” Now the next thing I’m going to say depends on how often you fly, and usually goes something like this..

YOU RARELY FLY: Look, I know it’s frustrating when the overhead bin above your seat is full, but the overhead bin space is shared space. That means anyone can use it. You. Him. Her. Everyone. Yes, you bought the seat below the bin, but you did not buy the bin.

YOU FLY A COUPLE TIMES A YEAR: If I could move some things around I would, but the bin is completely full already and there’s no way your bag is going to fit. I know it’s not fair! Particularly if you’ve only brought on-board one small bag, which I see is the case, but I can’t go POOF and make all the other bags disappear now can I?

YOU’RE A FREQUENT FLIER: There’s no need to show me your frequent flier card. Trust me, I already know you’re a VIP, which is why you’re sitting in the bulkhead row in the first place. You know as well as I do that first class is full (or else you’d be sitting there) and I can’t let you use that empty bin, not when we’re still waiting for a few first class passengers to board. Now I’m pretty sure you already know why, but since you’re still arguing with me I’ll spell it out. Because when you spend that kind of money to sit in first class, like you normally do, you expect to find an empty bin when you come on-board, too.

Ridiculous, my least favorite word a passenger can say, has just been used, and as that word is spat at me I see something happen that I knew was going to happen. Someone has just thrown their bags, two of them, into the empty overhead bin three rows back.

Now it is I who shakes my head, because you, dear passenger, will have to walk five rows back to get your bag into a bin, and as I tell you this, I continue shaking my head, and of course I add the word, “Sorry.” I’m always sorry.

“I’ll hold up the airplane when we land in order to get my bag out of the overhead bin five rows back!” exclaimed a passenger, a passenger who is also MY HUSBAND, a frequent flier I met on an airplane, after I had told him about what I was writing.

Completely appalled, I visualized the man I would NOT have married if I’d have seen him acting like that. “You’re kidding, right?”

Nope. He, the husband, a frequent flier I met in business class on a flight from Los Angeles to New York somewhere over Illinois, assured me he was not joking. And here I agreed to go out with the guy in the first place because I thought he was a nice passenger. Just when you think you know a person, they have to go and freak out over an overhead bin.

And so…after discussing the sensitive overhead bin topic quite thoroughly with the not so nice passenger / husband, I have concluded that if he had not been able to get his bag into a bin near his seat I probably would not agreed to meet him at the Starbucks located across the street from our layover hotel seven years ago. Which means we would not have had our beautiful baby boy a little over two years ago. Which means that my life, as I know it, would have turned out totally different.

“And I love my life,” I read out loud. It was the very last line of this post, and I wanted to know what the husband, who was now looking at me funny, thought.

“I never said I’d hold up the airplane!” he exclaimed, even though he most certainly did say that and I remember exactly when and where he said it – on the couch, during a commercial break at 9:15pm, two nights ago.

Okay so perhaps the man was hallucinating when I first read him this post. Or maybe he was just having a bad day. Taking it out on me and my overhead bin post. Who knows? All I know is I’m glad to he wouldn’t hold up the deplaning process in order to get his precious bag. He travels a lot. Over 100,000 miles a year. And flight attendants know he’s mine! Which means I can now go back to work and not worry about what the husband is doing on the airplane while I’m working another flight, standing between coach and first class saying, “Hello. How are you? Welcome aboard.”

Now that you’re curious about the other flight attendant pet peeves, click the following links:

Galley Gossip: Barbie boot camp (recurrent flight attendant training)

by Heather Poole on

“I feel sick,” I said to my mother, also a flight attendant, as we sped down the highway. Each mile brought us closer and closer to the training facility.

“Relax,” said my mother, a woman who does not know how to relax, especially when it comes to flight attendant training. Trust me. You should have heard her three months ago. “You’re going to do just fine.”

I always do just fine. I’ve had thirteen years of just fine. Even so, I still felt sick.

“Think you can slow down!” I exclaimed as I glanced at the speedometer. We were going way too fast! Okay fine, so we were only ten, maybe five, miles over the speed limit, but that’s too fast for a person who doesn’t want to be where they have to be any sooner than they have to be there.

Did I happen to mention I felt sick? It was that bad.

I don’t know what it is about recurrent training that makes me feel this way, but every month of August is spent dreading these two inevitable days. In fact, I don’t know a flight attendant out there who doesn’t get all worked up before entering the big building where it all began. Which makes me wonder, what the heck did they do to us during those initial seven and a half weeks of training thirteen years ago? Seriously.

My mother slowed the car and stopped beside a yellow curb. “‘You’re going to do great.”

I looked out the window at the the big building looming before us. “I don’t know about great,’ I said, and as I said this I could feel my heart beating, and my palms were sweating, as I kissed my sleeping son goodbye, grabbed my flight manual, and slowly walked up the stairs. One. Step. At. A. Time. Class didn’t start for another ten minutes, so there was no rush to get inside now was there?

When I walked through the double glass doors and stood in front of the giant swimming pool containing a bright yellow floating raft, a smiling training instructor greeted me by asking to see my three pound flight manual. She flipped through the pages, checking to see if thing was up to date, scratched my name off a long list, and then told me we’d be meeting in Room # 1.

“Up the stairs and down the hall,” the instructor said, still smiling, as she eyed another flight attendant walking through the glass doors.

I walked into the “Welcome to recurrent training” class and sat near the front of room (it was the only place left unoccupied), next to a very calm looking woman wearing spectacles and reading a paperback Grisham novel. Who can read at a time like this, I remember thinking to myself, as I looked around the room for someone, anyone, I knew, but I did not recognize a face. There were about forty of us in total. That’s when I heard the woman sitting directly behind me mumble, “I feel sick.”

Me, too!” I turned around to take a look at the woman who would become my new best friend for the next two days. There’s nothing like bonding over feelings of anxiety and stress.

“I used to know a girl who’d throw up right before training every year,” she added matter of fact.

The flight attendant reading the novel continued to read the novel (must have been a REALLY good book), as I turned all the way around in my plastic chair and introduced myself to Cynthia. Cynthia, like me, was a college graduate, only her major was in marketing, not psychology. Later on I would find out that Cynthia, like me, is also a writer, only she writes for a well known home and design magazine, not a blog.

Cynthia laughed as she said, “I never even got this worked up in college. Or with the magazine.”

“Tell me about it! My regular non-flying friends totally don’t understand.” Then I went on to tell her about my father, who, the night before, had the nerve to say half jokingly “What’s so stressful about making chocolate chip cookies?”

Chocolate chips cookies. He actually said that. My mother and I just glared at him and didn’t say a word.

“I’m joking!” said my dad, even though I’m not so sure he meant it.

The sad part is I’m pretty sure my father is not alone. I have a feeling a lot of people think all we do at “Barbie boot camp” is make chocolate chip cookies and serve drinks. Man oh man, I only wish it were that easy. Because if it were, I wouldn’t be freaking out now would I!

And so Cynthia and I began our two day “cookie making class” with a refresher course in fighting a fire at the fire pit by donning what looked like astronaut headgear and then we ended the day several exhausting hours later after evacuating passengers out window and door exits on six different aircraft, yelling and screaming our commands, popping open doors and inflating slides. Sorry, but I can’t tell you what, exactly, came in-between those two classes, but I can tell you it was intense, and at times stressful, and all of it highly classified, which involved airline safety and security. I can also tell you that Cynthia and I were more than happy when it finally came to an end. Together we left the training center, after exchanging email addresses, feeling relieved, yet confident and secure in the knowledge we had gained from our two days of training. Trust me when I tell you we, flight attendants, are prepared to handle just about anything. Even chocolate chip cookies.

In thirteen years of flying, I’ve only had a few medical emergencies on-board my flights, and thankfully each situation had a positive outcome. That’s because of the training the airline provided. So the next time you’re on a flight, crammed in the middle seat, take a look at the one working the drink cart in coach, or the one serving you freshly baked cookies and milk in first class, and remember they’re not just there to serve you, they’re actually there to save your life.

Galley Gossip: Ask a flight attendant – Positano, Italy

by Heather Poole on

While on a flight to Stansted, England, on our way to Venice, the New York based international flight attendant working on my side of the cabin eyed the book, Frommer’s Italy 2008, in my hands as she poured a little cream into my coffee. “Are you going to Italy?”

“We are,” I said, nodding my head at the husband who was asleep beside me. When she placed the cup of coffee on my tray table, I said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. So where exactly are you going in Italy?”

“Venice, Positano and Rome. Have you been?”

The flight attendant laughed, “Have I been? Too many times to count!” Click went the break of the cart. “I’ll be back as soon as I’m done with the service.” And like that she was gone, off to the next row where she offered the passengers behind us coffee, tea, cordials and dessert.

Want to know good, yet affordable, places to go, and eat, on your next vacation? Ask a flight attendant. Flight attendants are much like cops in respect to knowing great places to visit. Yet unlike cops, flight attendants aren’t just familiar with one city, they know the ins and outs of many different cities. Don’t believe me? Just ask the flight attendant on your next trip. You’ll see.

Ten minutes later the flight attendant was back at my row, a pen in hand. She placed a piece of paper on my tray table, a customs and immigrations form, and flipped it over. On the back she wrote the word POSITANO, and then began to draw as she said, “I go to Positano two to three times a year. Here’s what you need to do…”

“What?” said the husband who was now leaning over my shoulder.

“Positano,” I said. “She’s giving us the scoop on Positano.”

“My favorite place in the whole world,” said the flight attendant.

What I didn’t know at the time was Positano would soon become my favorite place in the whole world, too. It’s that amazing. That beautiful. And the food…absolutely delish! It’s the kind of place where you can just relax, sitting on your ocean view balcony, and let Italy come to you.

“Now this is the Doma.” She placed her finger on a sketchy looking arch. Then she marked a spot with an X. “Right here is a ceramics store. You’ve got to go here. This is where I bought the most beautiful set of ceramic plates. They’re gorgeous. Brown with red in the center and white around the edge, they’re perfect for the Valentine’s day dinner I host every year at my house.”

‘We’ll have to look for those,” I told the husband, and meant it. I wanted Valentine’s day plates, too!

And look over there – we found them, the beautiful Valentine’s day plates! At the store. Just like she said. But for some reason we didn’t buy them. Now I wish we had. Next time. Trust me, there will be a next time.

Three X’s marked the spots of good places to eat. “This is where you want to get your morning coffee. It’s right on the beach.” A box was drawn. “This is the gas station where you can buy bus tickets that will take you to Ravello and the Amalfi Coast.”

“We’re definitely doing that,” I told the husband.

And we did. Though we did it by scooter, not bus. What an amazing and unforgettable ride.

More X’s and boxes were drawn, as suggestions and recommendations were made. We only had three nights in Positano, so I was starting to wonder if we’d even have time for all of the things she wanted us to do, things we just had to do! Honestly, I think she was just as excited about our trip, if not more so, than we were! And this was our honeymoon trip – five years late.

Our trip to Italy in May was fantastic, and Positano, without a doubt, was the highlight. Heavenly is the only word to describe it. I can’t wait to go back. So if you’re reading this, Miss New York international business class flight attendant, thanks for the advice. And if you, dear reader, are thinking about going to Positano, here are my suggestions to you…

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