Leaving Rome

Piazza Navona

Okay, Rome is a very lovely city.  Beautiful ruins.  Kind people.  Terrible to get in and out of though.  Our journey into Rome was fraught with problems, and I am unhappy to say that our journey out wasn't easy either.  We had a lovely morning - cleaned up and packed and got ready to check out of the apartment.  When our host and hostess arrived they were gracious enough to allow us to leave our luggage their until 5 pm so that we wouldn't have to go pay to have it watched at Termini Train Station.  So very nice of them.  So we left it all there and headed off to Piazza Navona.  We had a great lunch at a bar just outside the Piazza and then wandered around until we found some gelato and a couple trinkets to take home.  All was well.

Wandering the streets of Rome.

We ran out of steam and out of ideas of what to do around 4, so we headed back to the apartment and got our luggage, and caught the metro to Termini.  We managed to navigate the self service train ticket machine and bought tickets for the fast train to Fiumicino airport.  Our train wasn't assigned a platform, and then it said "soppresso."  We stood there wondering for a couple minutes, then went and asked what that meant.  Soppresso = Cancelled.  Grrrr.  Why was I able to purchase tickets at 4:40 for a cancelled train that was supposed to leave less than 1/2 an hour later?  They had to know it was cancelled by then!  

So the agent told us to go find the bus to Fiumicino-there was a replacement bus for the train and it was free.  We ended up with two college kids from CU Boulder who were trying to get to the airport too and we all wandered around for about 20 minutes trying to find this bus.  Nope, no bus.  But we did find a different bus that would only charge us 4 euro per person to take their bus to the airport.  Why did I just spend over 40 euro on a train if I could have gotten us there for half that?  Instead I spent 40 on the train AND 20 on a bus.  Hopefully I can call the credit card company and get that fixed.

I sat with a Englishman who was trying to get home to London.  He was very late because of the train issue and I was actually concerned he might give himself some type of cardiac event because he was really freaking out.  I really couldn't blame him much, he got to the airport with only about 35 minutes to catch an international flight.  Yikes.

We on the other hand arrived around 6:45 for a 11:55 flight - so we had 5 hours to leisurely stroll through the airport, play our electronic devices, and eat more gelato, which we did.

The flight eventually left last night, 45 minutes late, and most of us dozed off at least for a little bit of the two hour flight.  Gabi and Isa were asleep before take off.  We arrived just before 4 am this morning in Santorini and immediately fell in love with it.  And then fell fast asleep.