The Flight & Day 1

It was a very long route to get to Rome, including a layover in Chicago and one in New York.  Our plane from JFK-FCO was delayed about an hour and I don’t think either of us got any sleep on that transatlantic flight.  I was completely drained by the end of our first day in Rome.  When we got to Rome, we took an 8 Euro shuttle bus to the train station in the center of town and stored our bags there while we enjoyed the first day.  We visited the Coliseum, Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, Pantheon, and Piazza Navona.  I bought Roma passes for us at the airport for 25 Euros and that allowed us free entrance at two sites and free use of the public transportation in the city.  We got into the Coliseum for free and were able to skip the big line, which was huge.  The whole day was amazing and we quickly realized that the whole center of Rome is one big museum.  Jessica had a lot of fun and said it made her feel like she was in the DaVinci Code.  I think the Pantheon was the highlight of the day for me.

We stayed on the outskirts of Rome at Hotel Laurence.  I had forgotten to record which buses we needed to switch to after getting to the last Metro stop Anagnina.  I gave in and took a taxi to the hotel from there, which ended up being 15 Euros and rather expensive.  I was way too tired to battle and was just glad to get to the hotel without much hassle.  Figuring out the hotel nuances was a bit of an adventure.  The hotel was relatively new and was clean.  We learned the hard way that they disable the thermostats in the fall, so the only way to get any air in the rooms is to leave the windows open.  I was exhausted so it wasn’t too big of a deal.  Jessica brought several Mountain House meals and between the time she asked if she should make one and it was ready, I was out like a rock.  We also learned that we needed to keep our hotel key inserted in a slot to have any lights in the room.

Day 2 & The Vatican

The hotel staff repeatedly insisted that they had wireless internet available in all the rooms and it was free, but I never found it.  In the process of resetting my internal clock, I was up at 5 AM with nothing better to do but look for some internet.  I walked around with my phone and found some neighboring networks that didn’t allow connection.  Finally on our way out the door, the guy told me to just sit in the lobby and keep trying to connect.  I told him I didn’t even see the network, and he finally admitted that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Lame.  So I’m going to sit and try to connect even when it clearly doesn’t work?  Over the course of our stay, each of the hotel staff seemed indifferent to our concerns.  Oh well.  It was a relatively cheap room.

With no internet, we were unable to make any reservations at sites like the Vatican museum.  We should have gone to that museum in the afternoon to avoid the tour crowds, but we went in the morning anyway.  It was just under an hour or so wait in line.  The museum was amazing, definitely the best museum I have ever seen.  I had no idea they had such a huge Egyptian collection and it soon became clear that Romans did not play video games, the paint and sculpt.  There were endless rooms of art.  The Sistine Chapel was very impressive.  The guard was repeatedly yelling “No pictures!” and telling everyone to be quiet, but dozens of people were taking pictures and quite loud.  The tour groups were like cattle herds and each of the tour guides had a little pole with some unique item attached to the end, identifying their group.

After the Vatican Museum, we proceeded to St Peter’s Square.  That was another phenomenal site to see.  At both the museum and St Peter’s there was a giant line, but not to buy tickets or anything…but just for the 9/11 style security checkpoints.  St Peter’s was unbelievably huge and ornate.  Romans didn’t play video games, instead they built unbelievable cathedrals.  People were gathered around John Paul II’s burial site.  It was very interesting to see Michelangelo’s giant Peter statue, holding the keys that Jesus had bestowed to him to lead the church and a rather ironic symbol that they missed the boat on what happened to those keys after that.

Day 3

On our final day in Rome, we just tried to hit a few places during the day time that we had been interested in.  A temple was announced in Rome and it is planned for the far north of the city.  We tried to visit the area and it proved to be very difficult to get there on public transport.  We traveled all the way up there to a large mall just west of it, Porta di Roma.  I didn’t have much to go off of beyond that other than I knew that it was just east of the mall and I had the address.  To my surprise, it was nearly impossible to cross the roads that surrounded the shopping center.  I eventually took a picture from afar and we called it quits.  We did stop at McDonald’s in the mall and enjoyed the experience of Italian McDonald’s mayhem.  We were well beyond the tourist areas of Rome and had to speak only Italian.  There were 6 or 7 lines of total mayhem and probably 15-20 employees in back buzzing away.  There was a teenage worker walking around in the lines with a PocketPC and taking orders, then handing a sticky note with the order number written down to speed up the process.  I gave him my order.  We waited a little while but eventually landed our Mozarrello di Menu.  They ended up being pretty good.

From there, we headed back into the center of town to the Capitoline Museums.  This was the second site of our Roma pass sites.  The museum was ok, but I was almost more interested in the nice overlook of the Roman Forum.  We made our way to the Spanish steps, stopping to take pictures along the way and throw an American quarter into Trevi Fountain.  We made it to Borghese Gardens and started walking around.  We were kind of tired of walking and saw people riding motor-assisted bike carts.  We rented one for an hour for 10 Euros and started cruising around.  That was a lot of fun and probably one of my highlights of Rome.  We went all over the place and even up and down dirt trails.  There was apparently a concert that night in the Gardens with “Sei Zero” performing.  We really enjoyed the Gardens.  I had been planning to go to the Borghese Gallery, but we lacked internet access at the hotel to make the reservations and I wasn’t particularly interested in another museum/gallery here.  I think we had a lot more fun cruising the Gardens.  We stopped at Piazza del Poppolo before hopping on the Metro and returning to the hotel.