Rome and Silversea Day 1

• Start of day: Home in North Carolina
• End of day: Somewhere over the Atlantic

Let’s start with some of my preparation. I had a severe travel itch and knew I wanted to get away to somewhere interesting in May. That worked best with schedules and weather. Initially I thought I might visit Croatia and Slovenia for the first time and had started doing research on that. Learning more about both countries, I decided I’d keep that in mind as a future family trip, for several reasons I won’t go into now.

Instead, I found a 7-night Mediterranean cruise on Silversea through my host travel agency, and it checked several boxes for me. 1) It was an opportunity to experience a cruise line I haven’t sailed with before. 2) The duration was long enough for me to get a sense of the Silversea offering but not so long it started to get cost-prohibitive. 3) Flights were straightforward and decently priced.¹ 4) The cruise started near Rome, a city I’ve wanted to visit for decades.

And so, it was a tight turnaround: I learned about the cruise on April 17, booked it on April 20, booked my flights on April 21, and flew on May 4. The cruise departed on May 8, so I left home today (May 4, arriving May 5) to give myself 3 nights in Rome before the cruise.

Oh, and since this would be my first luxury cruise, I definitely felt I needed to upgrade my wardrobe from my usual haphazard collection of jeans, polos, and outdated long-sleeve button-ups. Two trips to Nordstrom and a Turtleson order later, I felt ready.

I scheduled a Lyft to pick me up at 10:15am. I received this notification, prompting me to cancel my Lyft and schedule an Uber instead, because that’s not really a “tip” – it just means Lyft doesn’t know how to adequately compensate its drivers:

The Uber ride was fine. Given that the day was May the 4th, there was an Imperial presence at the RDU airport.

Today’s route was RDU to ATL then ATL to FCO (Rome). The first flight was fine, nice and short. Once I hit Atlanta, I only had around 45 minutes to kill. I went to lay eyes on my gate to confirm it actually existed (it did!), which left me about 20 minutes before boarding. The Amex Centurion Lounge was across from my gate so I went to have a quick look at that². It seemed nice enough, and even had an outdoor terrace area that was comfortable and quiet.

On the plane, I settled into my Premium Select seat on the inside aisle. About a minute later a woman asked if I’d be willing to trade for her bulkhead window seat so she could be with her husband. Yes. Yes, I would.

I won’t do a whole Delta Premium Select review here – there are articles like this one from The Points Guy. For me, it met my expectations and was decent value for the money, especially considering I booked it on short notice. Dinner was Airplane Fine.

Against incredible odds, I think I managed to get 3 hours of sleep on this flight?! That was with my head on a pillow leaning against the window. Turns out that would set me up well for a full day in Rome!

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