lummi island wine tasting april 5-6 ’24 - Lummi Island

Tuscany and the Volcano

Posted at May 19, 2010

The first thing you need to know about Italy (43N, 11E) is that it is a long way from Lummi Island (48 N, 122W). Central Italy isn’t much further south—a few hundred miles—but is 133 degrees east…about a third of the way around the world, about 8000 miles directly, more like six or seven if you follow a great circle, which is what most long-haul flights usually follow. A Great Circle is the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, represented by the arc traced out by a plane sliced through the sphere (Earth in this case in such a way that the beginning and end points on the surface and the center of the sphere are all in the same plane. Looking directly down on a Great Circle from above, it looks like a straight line. But on a map which is a plane projection of the surface of a sphere it looks like a long, sweeping curve. (http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SEA-FLR&MS=wls&DU=mi)

All YOU need to know (if link works, it will be clear) is that the Great Circle route from Seattle to Florence (Actually Paris was our first stop) goes directly over Iceland. Which really tells the story of our first very long day of travel.

The Good News was that we made the 8 am ferry from the Island, headed to Tulalip Casino in Marysville. Why there? Because the Airporter bus that runs from the border to Seatac stops there, and there is (I’m not making this up) Free Parking. And because our “scheduled” return flight gets us back to Seatac too late for the 7pm shuttle, we decided to hedge but getting off at Tulalip and racing for the ferry from there, since the shuttle arrives at Bellingham airport at 11:40 pm, a tight connection for the last ferry. (These things are important to Islanders!) So we’ll see how it works out on our way home.

volcano plume over Iceland

Bottom line: we got to Seatac two hours ahead of our scheduled departure (2pm) to find that our flight would be delayed five hours because of, you guessed it, the Icelandic volcano that no one can pronounce. Flights were being rerouted north of the great circle route to avoid the ash cloud, so we went over Copenhagen, and that added a hour or so to each flight, which messed up a lot of connections, which meant a lot of airplanes were not in the right place at the right time, like ours. So we arrived in Paris hours too late for our direct flight to Florence, and were routed to Geneva after a several-hour wait.

At Geneva we were met by Air France reps who hurried us via secret byways to a waiting plane from Baboo (I’m not making this up), a little Swiss commuter airline (same planes as Horizon brings to Bellingham, except new, clean, pleasant, and comfortable). On a one hour flight they managed to serve little tiny but lovely and tasty portions of about five different things, from a cold carrot soup to fresh melon chunks, a bit of chocolate…all very pleasant. After the long, incredibly uncomfortable Air France flight (we’re talking sardines here…very nice staff and food, but way too cramped) this little Baboo flight was truly a Breath of Fresh Air…Highly recommended! And so we arrived safely in Florence about 8 hours late. Unfortunately, our bags wound up in Frankfurt. But that’s another story. We were in Italy!