Day 1, & 2 Viva Roma! A Comedy of Errors; July 16 & 17, 2008

Hello everyone, here we are in Rome! I love this!

Larry, Dick and I arrived yesterday morning, after a long overnight flight, and the comedy of errors began! Oh, my heck! I should have known I was in for it when the plane came in to land, and we were very close to the sea. Huh? Oops! I thought we'd be arriving at the other airport! Oh, well, how tough can it be? That meant we'd have to hunt to find the train into town, but that was OK.

Then we were in a hurry to get on the train, and yes, you guessed it, I jumped on the wrong train! I kind of suspected when I saw everyone carrying suitcases getting onto the other train, but there were so many people in the aisle, I couldn't get off to check. As soon as the train pulled out, the conductor's voice came on and announced all the stops, and none of them sounded familiar. Oh dear, now should we get off, go back to the airport, and start over? I went to ask, but couldn't find anyone official. I was really worried that the conductor might come along and ask to see our tickets (which they usually do) and we didn't have a ticket to ride that train, so all 3 of us would get hefty fines. Just the perfect start for a trip to Europe!

After several stops and asking again, we decided to get off at Cittavecchia and try to transfer to the metro for the rest of the trip. After asking some more, we finally found the metro. The metro stop had a different name than the train stop (unusual) but lo and behold, I recognized where I was! So we hopped on, and it was the right line to take us directly to our hotel, and we didn't even have to transfer at the main station, and in 20 minutes we were at our hotel!

Larry and Dick and I flew over together, while Dick's brother Ron from England, and his girlfriend Edith from Paris were joining us a few hours later. Meanwhile, we had a hard time deciding which bus tour to take while we waited. Boy, did pick wrong! The bus was a double-decker with an open top and commentary in your earphones in any one of 8 languages. The ones I've had before were great, but this one was really boring. We were dying, fighting sleepy jet lag. At least it was good to sit down and be driven all around Rome to the sound of classical music!

When we 5 finally all got together, we headed for the Colosseum. Every time I go, it amazes me more! Here's a tip: the way to skip the 2-hour line for general admission is to march right around it and go to the window that sells guided tours! Hooray! Our guide was a little Italian lady that looked about 14, but she's already an architect, so maybe she knows an ancient Roman beauty secret. Anyway, she gave us lots of great info and we loved it.

By then it was too late to get into the Forum or Palatine Hill, so we went to dinner in a little family-run place near our hotel. It was so authentic Larry couldn't even eat his "roast beef." It was sliced really thin and was bright red! He was convinced it was raw, but Edith said you could tell it had been cooked, because it was brown around the edges. He sent it back to be cooked, and the owner gave him weird looks, but he cooked it brown!

The way to beat jet lag going this direction is to stay up until the regular bedtime in Europe. that means we'd been up for 40 hours straight before we went to bed, but we had no trouble at all falling asleep!