Day 2 - Who needs a stinking hotel room?

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My travel buddies (Rico & Gia) met me in the Rome airport. Their trip was much longer and they had to wait for me for 5 hours. Good thing they had to wait because their luggage was late on arriving from Paris.

We made our way to the buses with all our big fat American Luggage and found a bus that would take us to the Termini Statione. The traffic in Rome is terrible and it took us more than an hour to get to the Termini. The good thing was we didn't have to wait too long for our train to Florence. We found the bigglietti (automatic ticket stand), bought our tickets and made our way to the train.

Our seats were in different cars but we were not in first class so we were able to make the it work. The train ride was 1 hr 45 minutes. After a long travel day we were all tired, hungry and ready for a shower. Oh but it wasn't over yet. We still needed a cap to take us to our hotel. We got to the hotel and they had not reservation for me ... ugh! And they were full up for the whole week ... double ugh!

He called around for us and found us a room on the other side of the train station that had one room for one night. Hmmm - we will take it! The nice man called another cab for us and we were back in a taxi at 10:00 pm local time heading to our new hotel, Hotel Leonardo de Vinci. Much nicer and not as expensive as the first hotel. Sometimes things work out ... okay all of the time things do work out!

We got our room and the hotel had a dining room. Our first meal in Italy was in the hotel. At that point the food was delicious and what we needed. Our room was small but had 4 beds, a bathroom, a refrigerator, tv and a closet. SCORE!

We all slept hard and had a restful night, eventhough we were close to the train tracks. Always travel with ear plugs!

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