Title credit to Ellie, as explained at the end of this post.
We've only been here a week, and I already feel hopelessly behind documenting this trip! We were talking to someone about our flight here, and Joey said, "That feels like ages ago." True. We've been busy!
Our first full day in Rome was Sunday, January 19th. Here's a recap.
We had planned on attending church at 9:00 a.m., but the kids were still like rocks at 8:00 a.m., so we decided to let them sleep. We barely made it down for the hotel's breakfast, which closed at 10:00 a.m., then headed towards St. Peter's Square to catch the pope's appearance.
On our way to pretty much anywhere in Rome, we took a tram (or walked) to Piazza del Popolo.
Ainsley and Ellie were excited about their first metro ride.
Waiting, along with thousands of others, for Pope Francis.
And there he is!
Bathroom stop at McDonald's...seriously better than the Mickey D's back home!
Back at the Piazza del Popolo...the kids loved all the water fountains.
We loved wandering on the Via del Corsi:
My place.
Finally, gelato success!
Ellie quickly figured out what "Saldi" meant.
Pretty much everything in Rome was on sale. :)
At the Spanish Steps.
More wandering in the rain.
Rob can't walk past a church without a peek inside, so we saw quite a few.
Most of them still had nativity scenes up.
Joey's place. :)
At the Trevi Fountain. Trick of light, it was actually pretty dark by now.
]
Wet feet.
At the end of the day, the kids have to write journal entries, and after first protesting that his journal was private, Joey decided to share his hilarious and creative "Dear Diary" entry, prompting a "Battle of the Books" which has now become a nightly occurrence. Here we are crammed in our tiny, but nice, hotel room to hear what they came up with. Everyone liked Ellie's title, "Roaming Rome in the Rain", so we all stole it. :) It was interesting to hear what stood out to each of them. The one thing they all mentioned was breakfast at the hotel...I had to take a photo the next day, since it was obviously such a hit.
I need to backdate several posts to get us to this point, a year's worth of dreaming and planning, plus some serious thanks to my family and friends for so much help, especially over the past couple of weeks, but I know there are some grandmas anxiously awaiting news of our arrival, so I'll jump right into that.
My mom drove us to the airport at 8:40 a.m. If you had stopped by and seen the state of things at 8:40 p.m. the night before you would have never guessed that we'd be ready to go, and have our house ready for the renters in twelve short hours, but it's amazing what you can get done with a deadline and a lot of nervous energy. :)
I'm trying to work more video in on this trip...here are the kids waiting to board our flight to JFK.
Ainsley and Ellie last flew to Florida in January of 2006, so neither of them remembered flying.
Joey got a pair of aviators and has been striking a pose ever since. He's all swagger, asking me how to say "Can I get your number?" in Italian and French. He says his new nickname is "Cool Guy Joey." Funny. This is outside Shake Shack and LaBrea Bakery in the terminal, where we ordered and ate in record time, barely making our connection. If this were a foodie blog, I'd go on about the SmokeShack burger...mmm, peppers.
I can't really be the one to report on either the plane ride from SLC to JFK or from JFK to CDG (Charles de Gaulle, Paris) because I was out most of the time.
On the last leg of our trip, waiting to board an Alitalia flight to Fiumicio airport in Rome.
And...finally there, only to find out that the car we bought couldn't be picked up on Saturday, even though we'd confirmed on Thursday that we could pick it up then. They sent us to Hertz, where they'd arranged for a rental car, but it was a tiny four-seater. The person from the agency we bought our car from suggested that we hire a taxi for our luggage and two people and they'd reimburse us. Umm, no. Luckily they had a nine-seater available and we got out of the airport after only an additional hour or so delay. We had some tired and hungry kids. They were pretty patient in spite of that.
Finally on a road leading to Rome!
When we got to the hotel, Robbie asked me why they had a foot sink in the bathrooms. :)
I found our hotel, Hotel Villa Glori, on priceline, and got a great deal (130 euros/night for two rooms!) for this four-to-five star hotel. We've been very happy here. It's not really in the touristy part of town, so we stand out like crazy, but it's only a few tram stops away from the Piazza del Popolo, then a couple of metro stops to the Vatican.
We dumped our luggage and set out to find some food. We had some delicious pizza by the slice near our hotel.
And then we wandered a little. Can't remember the name of this little footbridge we found, I was still a little incoherent, just trying to stay awake to hopefully lessen the jet lag going forward.
It was about 60 degrees, which felt like summer to us, but we met some friendly Italians who were worried about poor little in Ainsley in her short sleeve shirt. :)
We'd hoped to find gelato, but ran out of steam before we were successful. We were in bed by 8:00 p.m., after going for about 28 hours. Still struggling with the jet lag though, and it's ten p.m., so day two will have to wait.
