A Journey to Italy

I just got back from an amazing trip to Italy with two of my best friends, we went for about 10 days to Rome, Florence, Lucca, Pisa and then back to Rome. It was such an awesome trip! I'll try and blog about it all in the next few days.
This was my first time getting a passport, and going off the continent. We took, what for me was a first transatlantic flight to Paris. The flight was long and somewhat miserable as 9+ hours on a plane can be, there were overhead movies projected, but they were all pretty stupid. Airplane food turned out to be not too terrible, not wonderful by any means, but not to bad for what it was. We had dinner and then breakfast on the flight over. We made it to Paris and that was the stamp we got in our passports (which was sort of disappointing for me, I wanted an Italian stamp). Anyway we were enjoying Charles Degual (sp?) airport and I had a delicious croissant there. Our problems started when our names came up on the screen telling us to report to a desk, this we tried to do but only stood in lines that didn't move. We gave up on the lines and got on our flight to Italy. In Italy we eventually discovered that our checked bags were still in Paris. The man we talked to told us that it was a fairly common occurrence and that we should get our bags in about 24 hours.
I would like to recommend that if you check a bag, you make sure that you have some essentials like socks and underwear in your carry on. Our bags, didn't get back to us until half way through our trip and so we had to get creative with what we had, washing socks etc. in the sink and hanging them up to dry was all too common. When we did get our luggage back we all had a small item or two missing, in my case a brand new package of socks and a tube of sunscreen, we have no idea why that happened. Also be wary of Air France, that's who we had this trouble with.
The plane trip back home was much more enjoyable because we had a plane with individual screens and so we could pick what we watched. Happily our luggage made the entire trip with us on the way back.
More to come on the trip. PS, we had a wonderful trip, but if you ever go to Italy, do it in the off season to avoid sharing the sights with a bajillion other people everywhere you go.