Dates: Sunday, November 16-17, 2025
Location: San Luis Obispo Airport to Taormina, Sicily
Weather: Rainy/62 degrees
At long last, departure day was here. My quasi-annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage to Italy. Ari, my dog, had spent the entire day before perfecting her “abandoned puppy” look while I tried to pack. Honestly, she almost guilt-tripped me into bringing her with me.
Carla was joining me for the third time on this Thanksgiving adventure. She’d been my partner-in-Italian-crime back in 2018 and 2019, so she knew exactly what she was signing up for. In my grand master plan, I had insisted we avoid the chaos of big airports like LAX or SFO. Why battle serpentine security lines when we could glide through San Luis Obispo’s tiny regional airport (SBP) with a check-in time that barely exceeds the duration of a sneeze?
It seemed brilliant… until the recent government shutdown started threatening to turn my clever shortcut into a spectacularly bad idea. In the days leading up to our departure, I even found myself hovering over the airline’s customer service number, wondering if I should admit defeat and reroute us through a proper big-city airport. But hope – and denial -springs eternal.
We left the house at 6:20 a.m. to roll into SBP around 7 for our 8:33 flight. Everything was blissfully on time – suspiciously on time, really – until about five minutes before boarding. The gate agents suddenly crackled onto the intercom: “The pilots have just informed us there are flow issues going into SFO, so they need to limit traffic. We will be delayed about an hour.”
Not ideal. We had four connections ahead of us, each with layovers hovering right around the one-hour mark. In other words: one delay to rule them all, one delay to doom them. I headed up to the gate agents to see what could be salvaged.
Because we weren’t typical SFO-bound commuters – but two travelers ultimately headed overseas – our options were… complicated. For the moment, they told us to stick with the plan. “You never know,” they said, “your next flight might also be delayed.” (Ah yes, the airline equivalent of “Let’s hope for the best.”)
So we waited. An hour later, they began boarding. We got settled, the doors closed, and the plane even started to push back. We dared to believe. And then—
“Folks, we’re going to need to head back to the gate,” the pilot announced. “An engine light has come on and needs to be checked. We suggest you deplane; it could be up to two hours before a mechanic arrives.”
Say what? At that moment, it was crystal clear: our neatly planned route was toast.
We hopped off the plane and told the gate agent we’d need to pull Carla’s luggage so we could reroute. This required a full exit through security and a visit to baggage claim – because travel is nothing if not an obstacle course. We collected her bag and marched over to the ticketing counter.
There, the agent began an intense stare-down with his computer screen. After several minutes of rapid-fire clicking, frowning, and eventually calling a United ticketing agent for backup, things were not looking promising. Finally, he asked the question no traveler wants to hear:
“Do you still want to leave today?”
Um = YES. Yes, we would very much like to leave today.
Cue more staring, more typing, more whispered phone calls. And then, at last, a small miracle: they found us a new route.
Our new route was… ambitious: SBP → SFO → LAX → Zurich → Sicily. A travel relay race across three continents. And the first leg? Leaving in about twenty minutes.
So we sprinted back to security – only to find that, in the fifteen minutes we’d been gone, SBP had transformed into a bustling metropolis. With only two security lanes, “busy” translates directly to “you will age here.” We inched our way through, finally cleared the scanners, and dashed to the gate.
The door looked closed. My heart dropped. I launched into my breathless explanation, but the gate agent just waved a hand: “Oh, don’t worry, we haven’t started boarding. The plane isn’t fixed yet. The mechanic needed to grab a different tool.”
Say what? This was the same plane we had already abandoned, and now they were giving a play-by-play of the tool situation? It felt… less than reassuring. They estimated another hour.
At that point, the math started mathing. If this flight was delayed again, we’d miss the SFO connection, which meant we’d miss the connection to LAX – and that was the one flight we absolutely could not lose. That flight was the gateway to Italy.
I pulled up our new itinerary. The LAX flight wasn’t until 7 p.m. The current time? 11 a.m. Which meant we had plenty of time to skip not one but two flights and just get ourselves to LAX the old-fashioned way.
I turned to Carla and said, “I think we should just rent a car and drive to LAX. At least that plane won’t leave without us.”
It was hard to argue with the logic: we had zero confidence that this plane would be fixed anytime soon – and even if it was, did we really want to board an aircraft that required a scavenger hunt for “non-standard tools”? Probably not.
Then it hit us – we needed to get Carla’s bag pulled off the plane again. Just as we were about to go ask, our airport guardian angel appeared: a young woman in an orange vest who had been helping us all morning. She walked in from the tarmac and said, “Hey, I just saw your bag being loaded onto the plane again. Do you want them to do that?”
Carla replied, “No, actually, we were just coming to tell you to pull it off. We’re thinking of driving straight to LAX.”
The woman leaned closer and whispered, “Good plan. That’s what I’d do if it were me… but you didn’t hear that from me.”
She retrieved Carla’s bag again, and we marched out of the terminal and over to the Enterprise counter. They had cars, but the agent cheerfully informed us there would be a $150 one-way fee to LAX. Hard pass. I asked, “Does Budget charge that?” She shrugged, which felt like permission to go investigate.
Great news: Budget does not believe in price-gouging desperate travelers. Ten minutes later, we had keys to something – I hadn’t even asked what it was. At that point, anything with four wheels and a functioning engine was luxury.
Out in the lot, we found our chariot: a perfectly respectable Hyundai Sonata. Four doors, a trunk, and the promise of movement. We were sold. The drive to LAX took only about three hours with almost no traffic; apparently, rainy Sunday afternoons are for staying home, not clogging freeways.
Dropping off the car at LAX was shockingly easy. I’d never used their new rental facility before – it was surprisingly modern and efficient. The only hiccup? Never assume the shuttle driver knows your terminal. We told her we were flying Swiss, international. She confidently dropped us at Terminal 4, the domestic American Airlines terminal.
After wandering around long enough to realize she’d been very confidently wrong, we course-corrected and hoofed it over to the Tom Bradley International Terminal.
We found the Swiss check-in counter, made it to the front, and handed over our passports – only for the agent to immediately walk them over to a supervisor. Never a good sign. He returned and said, “There’s a problem with your tickets. You’ll need to go to the counter at the very end – the blonde lady can help you.”
GREAT. Nothing inspires confidence like being redirected to “the blonde lady at the end.”
We joined the line, behind two complete HOT MESS parties. As they fumbled through bags, papers, and what might have been their entire earthly possessions, I had plenty of time to imagine every possible way this could go wrong. Was this year simply not my year for Italy? We had been traveling for what felt like a full geological era and were still spiritually parked on the 5-yard line, nowhere closer to Sicily.
Meanwhile, a mini soap opera unfolded to our right. A man in an airline uniform appeared with a very giggly, very attention-seeking woman on his arm. They began inching – inch by shameless inch – toward the front of the line, cushioned by a swarm of other uniformed airline employees. It was unclear whether they were trying to cut or just orbiting for attention, but keeping one eye on them and one eye on the check-in counters felt like trying to watch two different TV channels at once.
Finally, we were called forward by a man who had the most expressive facial tic I’ve ever seen. Bracing for bad news, we stepped up. Seat mix-up? Wrong booking? Some horrible United-to-Swiss glitch?
But no. He simply asked for our passports, weighed our bags, tagged them, and began printing boarding passes like nothing was amiss. To this day, I have no idea why we had to wait in another line – but I wasn’t about to ask. The important part was that we were getting on the plane.
And then came the cherry on top: because I had upgraded part of our original itinerary to Business Class (the Newark-to-Rome leg), Swiss decided to honor that upgrade on our new route. Suddenly, we were Business Class passengers from LAX to Zurich and Zurich to Sicily – with access to the Star Alliance First Class lounge.
After the day we’d had, entering that lounge felt like marching triumphantly into a conquered city. Carla immediately grabbed a fistful of complimentary mints, simply because she could. We were starving – our only sustenance all day had been on the drive down – a bag of crunchy Veggie Sticks from Trader Joe’s, purchased “just in case,” and those “cases” had absolutely arrived.
So we collapsed into lounge chairs, giddy, munching on free snacks, sipping free drinks, and reveling in the fact that, for the first time all day, we were not running, rerouting, or renegotiating something. We had two hours to breathe before boarding, and it felt like paradise.
The flight itself was pure bliss – a complete 180 from the chaos we’d survived to get there. We settled into our Business Class seats and spent the next 11+ hours basking in the luxury of it all: real meals on real plates, endless drinks, movies at our fingertips, and the ability to stretch out completely flat like well-rested starfish. After the previous day’s cardio workout through airports, it felt like heaven on wings.
Just before landing, they woke us gently with a surprisingly lovely breakfast – far superior to the usual “mystery muffin and yogurt cup” situation. We touched down in Zurich feeling almost human again.
Our transfer in Switzerland was a dream. Customs had zero line (a miracle), and before long we were boarding our final leg on Edelweiss Air, Swiss Airlines’ sister company – same family, same efficiency, same calm Nordic energy. It was almost starting to feel like this trip might actually happen.
Even two screaming children two rows behind us for the entire three-hour hop down to Sicily couldn’t dampen our spirits – we were so close. We landed in Catania, and our bags were practically the first ones off the belt, as if United Airlines was apologizing for the previous day. There was no customs to deal with, so we zipped straight to the taxi line.
That’s where we met Salvo – a polite 23-year-old who worked for his father and drove a gleaming Mercedes van. He told us he’d waited four hours in that taxi queue for his turn, so when he heard we needed a 40-minute ride all the way to Taormina, he said he’d practically hit the jackpot. Meanwhile, I was thrilled we weren’t the ones driving. Our Italian friends, arriving later, were renting a car, but after 30 straight hours of travel – and with nighttime roads ahead – letting Salvo take the wheel was absolutely the right call.
We reached our Airbnb around 10 p.m., starving. We grabbed a pizza to go and devoured it at the house while waiting for our friends Carlotta and Marta to arrive. The pizza was ready in about ten minutes and tasted like pure revival.
Carlotta and Marta arrived around 11:30, parking their rental car in a private garage about ten minutes away. We went down to the road to meet them, and within a few minutes, there they came – each with a tiny backpack slung over their shoulders. Their luggage for the entire week. You really have to hand it to Italian women: they know how to pack light, stylishly, and without fear.
We spent an hour catching up before Carlotta finally said, “Are we planning to stay up all night talking?” We all laughed – point taken. We had an entire week ahead of us. We said goodnight, drifted off to our rooms, and I took a quick shower, slid my silk pillowcase onto my pillow, and collapsed into bed.
At long last, after all the chaos and detours, I was in my happy place—Italy.
