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| Day 01. October 19, 2000. Gainesville, Atlanta. Flying to Italy. |
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We woke up excited, and spent the morning re-checking our gear. Jane slipped in the camera she said she wasn't going to take.* In the early afternoon we took a cab to the regional airport and began our journey with a shuttle flight to Atlanta. Our stewardess gave us the connecting gate information before we landed, so we made an easy connection. The actual flight to Italy departed at 5:30 in the evening and lasted just under nine hours, from gate to gate. Movies included Keeping the Faith and several lesser flicks as the night wore on. Dinner was either steak or chicken, and breakfast consisted of a hot turkey biscuit. Jane managed to get a minimal amount of sleep; Allan did not. *Jane writes: I said taking the camera would be too much like work and that I would spend all my time "making the shot" instead of enjoying the experience with Allan. At the last minute, I gave in to my need to document the trip and brought the all-manual Petri 7s rangefinder with a fixed 50mm lens. The camera once belonged to Allan's mother who got it from her brother who picked it up during the Korean war. Aside from having severe lens flare issues, its built-in light meter started out bad and progressively got worse during the trip until I had to give up on it entirely and rely on my own judgement. On the plus side, the Petri has quick, pin-sharp focusing (dual image through the range finder) an aperture of 2.8-16 and a shutter speed of bulb-500. Plenty of range for our vacation--no batteries to worry about, and, in its beat-up ever-ready case--no one would ever think to steal it. |
