Rome and Vatican city(a country)

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Day 91
Rome, Italy

We were off at the crack of dawn for a 12 hour bus ride; sometimes you just have to suffer these things. Civitavecchia, the port out of Roma is about 1 ½ hours away so we opted for a ship tour, because of distance and time constraints; if we were late, the ship would still wait for us.
We disembarked at 8:15 to board a slow bus to the city. After much delay, we reached the outer bus depot at 10:30 and had to run to the Vatican in the rain, get in a line up to finally enter by 11:35.
We followed the crowd for a while through miles of art, deeked out, skipped some and veered to the Sistine chapel to revel in its beauty. The tour guide had told us about the right hand front grey door used by tours- so we turned right and went almost straight into Saint Peters. At this point, we all separated and decide to meet in ½ an hour at the obelisk. That worked!

World Youth Day, it was busy; teens all over!

It is 1 and we have to be back at the bus by 5; I took a unilateral decision that Terry and I would go for the hop on, hop off bus, the rest could run Rome on their own. We paid our 13 Euros and spent the next few hours on the top of a double decker bus and saw it all in 2 hours. Lovely, especially because we were listening to commentary all along.
We then walked from the bus to the Spanish steps and sat with the same young large crowd; I was impressed by the names of the couturier houses at the bottom of the steps: on the left Dior and try to see what’s on the right.

Back to the Prinsendam by 6:30 and relaxing until Ajjacio, Corsica, France.
We seem to be following spring around the world; trees are in bloom all over. Lovely.

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