FRA to BLQ to Ravenna

The flight from Frankfurt to G. Marconi Airport in Bologna (BLQ in airport code) was on Air Dolomite, a subsidiary partner of Luftansa.  It's the equivalent of Horizon Air to Alaska Air or American Eagle for American Airlines.

We got the royal treatment for 20 minutes as we were the only ones on the plane.  We even got serve pastries that no one else got.

The flight was routine - I think - I fell asleep the moment we lifted off and came awake when the pilot was doing his pre-approach speech.  I did hear him say that temperature in Bologna was 38 C.  That works out to be a nice round 100 F!!!!

When we checked in with Luftansa at gate A4, the gate agent was not real sure what to do about Scott's scooter.  We had sent all the info to Luftansa ahead of time and received permission to fly with the scooter - so I showed her the email confirmation.  Well she proceeded to create a luggage tag for the scooter, plus a "deliver to aircraft" tag.  The front of the scooter looked like more like a lampost that people kept putting tags on.  

bottom left (orange) Singapore Air Tag
middle PRIORITY tag for FRA-BLQ
top "Deliver to Aircraft" tag from Luftansa

As you can imagine, none of this worked.  The Air Dolomite crew watched Scott go up the stairs to the aircraft in Frankfurt.  As we landed the attendant told us to remain in our seats while the other passengers left - which we did, expecting it to take a few minutes to deliver the scooter.  Rather than let us go down the stairs, we had to go to the back of the aircraft and onto a wheelchair lift.  Overkill we thought.  We expected it to just lower us to the ground, where we could get the scooter.  Oh NO!  He turned towards the terminal... delivering us to an area behind the baggage claim area, where another guy waited with a wheelchair for Scott.  We were trying to explain that we didn't want that, we wanted his scooter.  

Long story short, after multiple phone calls and after all the other baggage had been picked up his scooter arrived.  

I had used the webpage visitravenna.it to request a car and driver to take us to Ravenna. We could have reached Ravenna by monorail to Bologna Centrale train station and taken a local train - but that would have meant schlepping the bags multiple times and rolling them two blocks from the train station to the apartment.  

All the misadventure with the scooter occured inside the secure area (we had not yet cleared customs) and, of course, our driver was waiting in the arrival hall.  Finally he cought up with us.  His first concern was that we had too many bags - they wouldn't fit in his car.  He had a nice Mercedes, and we showed him a few packing tips that got everything in without damaging his car.  

I asked the driver if it was any cooler in Ravenna because it's on the coast.  No he said.  

The autostrada between Bologna was bumper to bumper (this was after six - a bit late for rush hour).  It was strange to have that much traffic and be looking out at rolling farmland. As it turned out a truck had gone off the road... once we cleared that location traffic sped up. I looked over and our driver was going 143 kmh - that's 88 mph.  He was really ready to be done with this trip.  He dumped us off right in front of the door, while I was getting the keys out of the lock box.

We made it to our air conditioned apartment in Ravenna at 8 pm just as the sunset.  Lugging bags the 40 feet from the curb across the courtyard had us hot and sweaty.   (Imagine if we had gone with the original plan of coming by train!)

By an hour later we were asleep!  Two days of travel caught up with us.