The trip went by in a blur, but the photos will help me remember what a great time it was.

Well, not all of it was so great. We had 2:30 wake-up calls and 4 a..m. wake-up calls, but that’s part of the game.

Some valuable advice I was given early on my career was this: eat, sleep and use the bathroom every chance you get, because you’ll never know when another will come. I thought of that when we were reporting from in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and journalists needed a security escort to get to a bathroom in a department store. We were told the escort could only be used for emergency cases!

One of the wonderful things about traveling with the pope is that you always run into friends and colleagues from the past. In Washington I worked with producer Anne Marie Riha, who I had last seen seven years ago in Jerusalem. And while I was reporting at the UN I ran into Sabrina Arena, an old friend from Rome who’s now in New York. Multi-lingual and multi-tasking, Sabrina was doing an interview in Spanish just a few satellite trucks down from me. Sabrina and her husband are doing their best to reverse Italy’s population problems, as they now have five kids. The children were with her parents right down the street from the UN, and I saw the smallest three for the first time.

(From left to right)

• New York’s Finest
• Producers Anne Marie Riha and Stacy Hickman with make-up artist Mary-Ellen Tasillo.
• Nationals Park at the start of the Mass
• Sabrina Arena and Company
• Paul Alvarez, Harriet Taylor and Woody outside St. Patrick’s

I’m happy to report there were no injuries among the news-nerds boarding the papal flight this time.

When we were going to Turkey, one of them tripped another coming out of the bus that took us to the plane, sending him rolling on the tarmac. But the fallen nerd got right back up, and despite a sprained wrist still made it to the front of the press section, just to prove that he may be a news-nerd, but he’s not a total nerd.

There aren’t a whole lot of scuffles on papal trips, although once the photographer from Time Magazine did deck a guy who was crowding his space. The judges awarded the Time guy a TKO, but I think he eventually lost the lawsuit from the guy who lost his teeth.

Pope Benedict came to the back of the plane to answer a few questions, on the sex abuse crisis, on immigration, on the United Nations and human rights, and on United States as a model of religious freedom and a secular state.

On sex abuse, Benedict said it was time to heal the wound, and the crisis has meant much suffering for the Church in the U.S. “and for me personally,” adding that on reading the cases that arrived in Rome it was difficult for him to understand how priests betrayed their mission. “We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry,” he said.

Photographing the Pope; Papal headrest

The Pope looked liked he was in good shape, slightly tanned and patient as usual with all the flurry around him. Benedict XVI said he was making the trip in a spirit of joy: “I know this great country, and the liveliness of the Church there, despite the problems.”

There are two theories about flying with the pope. One is that the plane will never go down. The second is that if it does, everyone goes to heaven.

Apparently Benedict is going to answer five questions for us on the flight. There’s always a huge scrum to get seats at the front. At the front of the back, that is. All the Vatican hotshots are up front, and 50 or so journalists are in economy, although the price is anything but economical. (We normally get first class food, though, if that’s any consolation.)

In the journalist section, the news nerds are in the front, the cool calm people in the middle (that’s where FOX will be) and the photographers in the back, so they can make a quick exit and get a shot of the pope after we land. The photographers all look like guys (although there’s one woman among them) who only put on their ties three times year, when they’re on the papal plane.

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1- Top Photo: News conference on board. To the left of the pope is Cardinal Bertone, the secretary of state, and to his right is papal spokesman Fr. Lombardi.

2— Half of a pope trip is waiting in line.

This is outside the cathedral in Sao Paolo. Everyone seems to be asking, “Are you going to let us in?”

3— No talking in church.

Once inside the cathedral, with Tricia Thomas of APTN, Associated Press Television.

“You must have a glamorous job,” quipped cameraman Mal James to me on Friday night as we were breaking down after Pope Benedict’s Way of the Cross at the Colosseum.

It was pouring rain, freezing, and there we were, rolling up cables and packing up lights. No, not exactly glamorous. It is an interesting job, I have to admit, but a lot of times the conditions can be pretty miserable.

Today it was more of the same. We did a first live shot just as the Pope was giving his Easter greetings, at 7 a.m. Eastern, or noon Rome time. Mal, producer Mario Biasetti and I were huddled under a tent, but it wasn’t much protection, either for us or the equipment. There was plenty of thunder and lightning, and loads of rain and enough wind to get us all wet and miserable. Glamorous indeed. After the live shot we just high-tailed it into the office.

Despite the weather, there were still tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square for the Mass and Blessing today. If you’ve come all the way from the United States or from Latin America — as many of the pilgrims have — a little or even a lot of rain is not going to stop you from going to see the Pope. Not exactly the weather for an Easter Egg hunt, but you don’t make a pilgrimage to Rome for that.

Finally, the Pope gave us a little bit of news overnight. Italy’s best known Muslim, an Egyptian-born journalist named Magdi Allam, was baptized at the Easter Vigil in St. Peter’s Basilica.

I have a feeling the powers that be at the Vatican didn’t think too much about what the repercussions of this could be. Allam, an outspoken critic of Muslim extremists, and a vocal supporter of Israel, writes for the Milan daily Corriere della Sera. He was a controversial figure to begin with, and this will only add to his notoriety. As some Muslims here pointed out, Allam could have easily been baptized quietly in a small parish near his home, and not made a big deal of it. But he, and apparently the Vatican, decided otherwise. All this high-profile attention, including two full pages of stories about the conversion in his own newspaper, will only anger Muslims even more. And it’s all happening just when relations between the Vatican and Muslims looked like they were getting better. So much for that. It’s really a kind of in-your-face move, on the part of both Allam and the Vatican, and I’m sure we haven’t heard the end of it.

I’ve worked out of Rome for FOX since 9/11.

Not because of 9/11; I just happened to have changed jobs that September. I was actually on vacation in Sicily when the Twin Towers got hit. Having come to FOX from Time Magazine, I was new to television — but got a lot of help from Rome producer Mario Biasetti, who’s been working in TV longer than I’ve been alive. I also got sent quite often to our Jerusalem bureau, to give a hand covering the intifada — so that meant a lot of live television experience in a very short period of time.

I survived “Papal April”: the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Benedict 16th in 2005, although it was actually a three-month ordeal, as John Paul first went into the hospital in February. I spent a lot of time in a wet and cold parking lot outside the Gemelli Hospital, and if it had lasted much longer I would have also ended up in the hospital. Keep Reading …