italia: travel day + rome

Tdud and I left Memphis on a Saturday morning (not too early) headed to Charlotte to catch our flight to Rome.  We got to Charlotte around lunch with about 4 hours to kill.  Lunch was overpriced airport food, then we walked around stretching our legs before the 9 hour flight we were about to board.  We enjoyed people watching from rocking chairs, and were almost tempted to get free flight vouchers to re-route our flight to Paris, then Rome (and would have arrived at the same time), but we didn't end up doing it.... we should have. :)

T was keeping his fingers crossed for TV's in the back of the headrests, and sure enough we had them!  He of course forgot his headphones, so he had to buy overpriced cheap headphones courtesy of our airlines... but $5 well worth it for 9 hours of entertainment!

We arrived in Rome on Sunday morning, exhausted, and knew we had to stay awake alllllll day.  Well it ended up taking until about 1:30 to get to our hotel (trains, buses, etc), and we wanted to hit up the sights!  The grizzlies were in the midst of round 2 when we left, and T wanted to snap a photo in his grit grind shirt for Chris Vernon at the "original grindhouse" (what T referred to it as.. aka, the Colosseum).  :)

In preparation of this trip, he kept saying, "I can look at a photo of the Colosseum and appreciate it for the rest of my life."  I think he ate his words when he was actually standing inside it.  I knew it!

We walked around the Roman Forum, too, and then through the big capital building to make our way towards the Trevi Fountain (my favorite spot).

It was PACKED over there, and we had to fight through stubborn tourists to make our way down to the front to throw in our lucky coin...

Traveling just the two of us means we have a lot of photos of each other... but I always tried to scope out the crowd to find someone who might not mind taking a photo of us.  I wasn't as successful in front of Trevi, but you can't always expect the best.

At this point we had been wandering around Rome taking in the sights, but we were getting to be very tired so we walked back towards our hotel, which was close to Piazza Navona and the Pantheon.  When I went to Italy in college, the Pantheon wasn't open, so I got to see inside this time.  Very cool!  T thought so too.

It was time to eat food and gelato, so we found a little restaurant in Piazza Navona, and I'm sure the waiter was curious about the zombie-like people that sat down at his table... pure exhaustion.  We somehow managed to stay awake until 8:00pm, but of course I woke up wide awake at 6 am.

Monday we were headed to Cinque Terre in the afternoon, so we wanted to do Vatican on Monday morning... well unfortunately we missed all the early morning tours to see the Sistine Chapel.  Another visit to Rome and I still haven't seen that beautiful thing with my own two eyes.  Some of our exploration of Vatican City...

T took this photo to tweet A. Snow "the Pope picks the Grizz in 6." Wish it had been true....

We headed back to our hotel to grab our bags so we could head to the train station to catch a train to Cinque Terre.  By the time we got there, we had missed the earlier train, so we had about an hour and a half before our train would leave... So we found a pizza place to grab a late lunch (huge backpacks in tow).  And then we had to wait for them to post our bin number.... See how cute T is with his travel gear?!

On the train to La Spezia (a nice 4-hr ride), we sat near some very interesting characters... One pod of Italian men were playing poker, and another pod was listening to their music (with headphones) blaring and chatting very loud in Italian, Portuguese and maybe some Spanish??  I [tried to] read The Help on my mom's kindle....

While T played Angry Birds.  We got to La Spezia just in time to catch our next train to Riomaggiore, the first town of Cinque Terre.... which I will go into detail about later!  We loved our time in Rome, but were glad to get out of the hustle and bustle of the big city!