My first blog: Day 1 of my 50th birthday trip in Rome

Hi!

I wrote a journal while we were on our trip, so I thought I might be fun to blog the trip, rather than post a review and photos separately. I hope you enjoy it. After I run out of things to say about this trip, I might go back and write about others I have taken as well. Here goes!

Background: Me: Deb, now age 50. Chemist by degree, currently Quality Assurance manager at a biotech company. Rick, husband, age 49. Engineer by degree, currently a Sr. Engineer at a defense industry company. We have two boys, Stephen and Bobby, who are 22 and 19, respectively, in college and no longer get to travel with us. We live in Nashua NH. On this trip, JoAnne, my sister, age 54, joined us. I invited my entire family, but she was the only one who had the time (and money) to join us.

The Trip: 11 days on the Celebrity Galaxy cruise ship, with two days in Rome prior to sailing. Itinerary included stops in Mykonos, Rhodes, Santorini, Istanbul, Kusadasai, Athens and Naples. The trip was in the planning stages for almost a year. I like to know what to do if "plan A" doesn't work out, so I research and gather lots of info about where I am going, who has been there recently and what helpful hints they could provide. Since this trip was a cruise, so my two main sources of information was tripadvisor.com and cruisecritic.com.

I worked with my travel agent to book my air, cruise and pre-cruise hotel in Rome. Rich and Jeri of carefree-vacations.net are the best. I changed my cabin 3 times, and although they probably swore up and down about me to each other, they never let on what a PITA I am when trip planning directly to me.

First stop: ROME! For Rome, my "guide" was Rick Steves. I bought the newest travel guide and downloaded self guided tours of the Forum, Pantheon, Colosseum, Vatican and Sistine Chapel onto my ipod. I also downloaded his shows where he interviewed local guides from Rome. I was ready!

Finally the day was here. October 10, 2008. Plan was to take the local direct to Boston bus to the airport and to buy round trip tickets so we don't have to have anyone picking us up when we get back. That was my first mistake of the trip. After buying the tickets, I realized that our return flight was scheduled to land 10 minutes later than the last bus from the airport to NH. So, we returned our return bus ticket and called Stephen to see if he could pick us up when we got back. Fortunately he wasn't scheduled to work late that night, so we were all set.

The flight was from BOS to LHR, then on to FCO. I don't sleep on planes. Rick does. He slept almost the whole time both flights. I think I got in an hour on the second flight. There was plenty of time between flights to make the VERY long transfer from terminal 3 to terminal 5 to catch our BA flight to Rome. I joked that terminal 5 was really not at Heathrow but at Gatwick, it took so long. For Bobby's sake, we got to take a picture of Rick with a Ferrari at Heathrow. (No Bobby, we did not spend 20 British Pounds to try to win it. We wouldn't have a place to park it anyway.) I thought we were landing in Rome at about noon. Nope. We were leaving London late due to fog.

We landed at Rome at about 1:30 and took the train to Termini station. The ride brought us past apartment buildings with lots of colorful clothes hanging out the windows, past graffiti, past EUR and Trastevere, and finally into the heart of Rome. We grabbed our map and bags and off we went to find the hotel. We left the station and walked out into....a protest march or rally of some kind! Apparently the communist party of every part of Italy was in town. And it marched right past where we were. It was interesting. Young and old, straight and gay, flags, chants, people with loudspeakers on trucks, and I had no idea what they were saying or why they were protesting. It was peaceful and the people marching seemed happy. I took photos. And we were able to cross the street without worrying too much about traffic. Our hotel, the Best Western Mondial, was very easy to find and just a few blocks from the train station. I had emailed earlier in the week to confirm our reservation. They confirmed they had it. But we got there and we weren't in their system. Of course. This should have been an omen of how my trip was going to go. But I smiled and told them it was my birthday and to find me the best room they had! They chatted amongst themselves, crossed out someone else's name on the list and wrote down ours and put us in a nice room on the 5th floor. No view, bad AC, stained tub, but it had a clean large bed and a working bathroom. And as we found out the next morning, a really nice breakfast. JoAnne was arriving the next day, so I verified that they had her reservation, and she was on the list.

After a change of clothes and a splash of water on our face we were on our way. We had planned on going to EUR, the modern Rome that Mussolini designed, but on the train in we realized it was a bit out of the way, so we decided to find a few churches that I had read about. Our first stop was Piazza Republica. Our first fountain encounter. I was amazed at how many fountains, statues and artwork in general we found just walking around Rome. I was looking for a particular church, fortunately, I took us to the wrong one. We ended up at Santa Maria degli Angeli. It doesn't look like much from the outside, but inside is absolutely beautiful and interesting. On the floor running diagonal across the whole main room was a star calendar,and tiles depicting the zodiac. There is a window near the ceiling that sunlight comes though at a certain time of the day and illuminates a place on the star line to tell you what is in the sky that night. Not what I would expect in a church! We encountered our first Gypsy there, a man, standing at the door with a basket, dressed in black. We mistook him for a priest and put money in the basket. We didn't make that same mistake at the rest of the churches we went to that day!

The next church, the one I was looking for the first time, (which wasn't easy to find because there are so many of them in the area named Santa Maria), was Santa Maria della Vittoria. I wanted to see the marble sculpture St. Theresa in Ecstasy by Bernini. Well, the whole inside of the church was like an art gallery. The ceiling, the walls, the sculptures everywhere!

Third on the list was the church that had the crypt of the Capuchin monks, the Church of the Immaculate Conception. We could not take photos there. It was amazing. Macabre but beautiful. The thousands of bones of monks from the 1800s have been arranged in beautiful designs on the walls and ceilings, and used to make chandeliers and sconces. The dirt on the floor was said to have been brought to the area around 600BC and was used to originally bury the monks.

By then we were hungry so pulled out our trusty Rick Steves guide to find a place to eat. Of course, in the area of the city we were in the choices were limited. Most of the places he recommended were open for lunch, but not dinner. We wandered around and finally found a place listed in his book. An Irish pub. I don't recommend it. The food was ok, but not great. I wanted REAL Italian, and this was not it. So, we ate quickly, paid the bill and headed back to the hotel. On the way back, we bought a liter of beer from a street vendor. We got to the room and opened the beer. I didn't want to stay in yet. We only had two days in Rome and we had only seen 3 churches. So I talked Rick into going out and finding some gelatto. The front desk people weren't sure, but sent us in the general direction of where they thought we could find some. We found a place that had wonderful gelatto, I had one scoop of chocolate and one of hazelnut. Rick had cannolli flavored. We then headed back to the hotel, finished our beer, and went to bed. it was 8:15PM local time.

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