Rewind to 1994, when I was ten years less experienced at this game, but still should have known a lot better:

Finishing up a long weekend vacation in Florence, I was due to fly to London to go back to work. I looked at my ticket, read the 9:10 AM flight time, and realized glumly that I had to get up really, really early to get a taxi to the bus station and then the bus to the Florence-Pisa airport, about an hour away. I set my alarm for 5 AM and dragged myself out of bed the next morning. Looked in the mirror and noticed in horror that I had gotten some kind of insect or spider bite during the night that caused a huge bump on my forehead, like a golf ball. (Think of Matthew Broderick in "Election," with the bee sting.) Anyway, I still had to get to the airport, so I got my cab and got on the bus. When I reached the airport, I saw an amazing number of policemen standing around with machine guns and dogs, and someone told me that the president of Italy was expected to fly there that day. OK.

I went over to look at the monitors to check if my flight was on time--and began to panic as I didn't find it on the monitor at all! In terror, I went up to the counter and asked about the flight, only to have the agent point out to me that my flight NUMBER was 910, whereas my flight TIME was 16:45. (At least it wasn't the other way around. That's the only good thing I can say about that day.)

Thus I found myself sitting in Florence-Pisa airport, which was about the size of a mid-size city's bus station in the US, for the next nine hours. With not even a restaurant, just a snack bar where I drove the counter guy insane by asking repeatedly for ice cubes to put against the huge bump on my head. With Italian secret service agents and policemen watching me continually, wondering what this loon with scruffy clothes, an overstuffed daypack, and a huge bump on her head was doing sitting on the floor of the airport for nine hours on a day when the President was due to fly through.

Oy.