Yoiks, Rome...

Its been awhile. I knew it had been awhile but didn't realize exactly how long it had been. Looking back I see 2019 wasn't a good year for blogging, lets try harder in 2020.

Anyway when we last left off it was May, so lets look back...

At the end of May we went to Italy. This was Angie's first trip to Europe and the first time in 25 years for me, also my first trip to Southern Europe and my first European adventure as an adult.

We flew into Rome and spent one night there. I got us a room at Hotel Indigo on points as its part of the Holiday Inn chain. The hotel was lovely and our first Italian meal was in the hotel restaurant. This is normally something I don't do as hotel restaurants usually aren't great however this one was terrific and has a lovely rooftop view.

Then off to adventure! Rome is a very difficult city at first, any city takes me about a day to get used to and of course thats the difficulty with only spending the one night, in retrospect we should have done at least 2 but probably 4.

We had 2 goals for day 0, the Pantheon and Trevi Fountain. The amazing thing about Rome is that you can't hardly go anywhere without finding some piece of ancient history. I'm told this is why its so hard to build subways there, they dig a little, then call in the historians to examine what they found.

Anyway our hotel room came with a "handy phone" which I wish I'd thought to take a picture of, actually its just a cheap cell phone but it had service. Since I'm a bit of a cheapskate I'd opted not to get a European SIM for my phone so we had no service. We also had no map so the handy phone was super helpful.

The first thing we really found was more food, there are pastry shops everywhere...

Theres also coffee everywhere but only espresso. Toward the end of the trip we stayed in a hotel that had "American coffee" which was (no joke) a Mr. Coffee machine. Interestingly coffee (well, espresso or cappuccino) is always 1€ everywhere we went. I appreciated the standardization. ;)

Anyway the Pantheon was a fairly short walk away, the Handy Phone came in very handy, we probably wouldn't have found it otherwise, or we'd have had to get one of the tourist maps everybody else had.

The Pantheon is an old Roman temple that was converted into a church. Its pretty amazing to find because its hemmed in by the rest of the city. There is a large courtyard in front but the sides are nestled against the street with fairly tall buildings on either side. Its a great first thing to visit because its free and you can just wander in. The crowd was busy but not huge.

The skylight has no glass, the floor has holes in it to let water out...

Some more walking got us to Trevi.

Trevi was busy but as it was fairly late in the afternoon we could get in pretty easily. Going in May is an advantage, it wasn't too hot and while it was busy I'm sure it gets worse in the high season. I know we took more pictures but I can't find them. We did throw coins into the fountain which is supposed to ensure that you'll return.

I was wiped at this point, we'd left home at 3pm the previous day, I don't sleep well on planes and we'd been walking for 3 or 4 hours. We headed back to the hotel stopping to get some pizza which was sold by weight...

After sleeping like the dead we had a few hours to kill before flying south. We wandered around and found ourselves at Castel Sant'Angelo which is pretty amazing as a historical site but also interesting as a dog park. Apparently the citizens of this part of Rome bring their puppers here to run around. It was a pretty great way to start a travel day.

The castle was  the tomb of the emperor Hadrian but later a bunch of other emperors were also interred there. It was later converted into the castle. This picture is taken from "Pons Aelius", the Aelian Bridge. Its watched over by statues of 10 angels. Its only a short walk east from Vatican City and was also called "bridge of Saint Peter".

 Michael the Archangel watches over the whole place.

The bridge is over the Tiber. There must be some kind of open air market on weekends, they were just setting it up when we were there.