Home at last - with a few problems

As I feared, my flight to Amsterdam was somehow cancelled but the rest of my flights, from Amsterdam to Houston and Houston to Austin were fine and I had my boarding passes. Continental goofed up!
Luckily a nice lady from Alitalia, spent about 30 min. trying to figure out what was wrong and correct it - and she finally did. But the story starts even earlier.
I woke up about 4:45 am so I could check out of my hotel, walk the 3/4 of a mile to the Metro to go to the train station to catch the train to the airport. My flight was a 9:15 am. All went well - until I got to the Metro at 5:20 am - the doors were locked! I walked around for 10 min. thinking that maybe they would open at 5:30 am. Nope!! So I started walking back to my hotel - grumbling since no one mentioned that little fact - and luckily on the way, I saw a taxi (who knows what he was doing at that time since no one in Italy gets up early) Anyway, he took me to the train station and I had to wait abouty 30 min. but got to the airport in plenty of time - except that I had no ticket! After all was figured out, I was on my way. I had a 2 1/2 hr layover in Amsterdam and walked around the airport. It's enormous but very well organized. When you check which gate your flight is leaving from it not only tells you the gate but also how long it will take to walk there.
They also have some small casinos in the airport and yes, I had to lose 10 euros there before I went to my gate.
The really good news is that I had a whole row of 3 seats to myself on the 10 1/2 hour flight to Houston. That was fantastic - room to lie down or spread out all of my "stuff". The flight to Austin was delayed about 30 min but I finally got home about 10:15 pm. Because of the 7 hour time change, I have been up over 24 hours. Hopefully all of those awake hours will quickly get me back on central time.
Again, pics to come! And of course I'm missing Italy a bit - especially Venice and Florence.
I do plan on going back some day.