We arrived at Civitaveccia, the port for Rome, where it was a blustery and chilly morning. Last night, as we passed Portofino, we felt the predicted gale force winds. The ship was moving so much that, as we headed to the ship's Motown production show we could not help but bounce off the walls. Doing stairs was a "grab onto both hand rails" event. Before the show, one of the props kept sliding out of position so they had to remove it. But the show went on! The dancers did a great job of handling the moving deck. Mary and I were both feeling a bit queazy so we took the sea-sickness pills and went to bed. But shortly after we took them, the ship cleared that weather pattern and was not rocking as much. At least the medicine helped us get a good night's sleep!
Our shuttle was not scheduled to arrive until 9:30 so we were among the last people off the ship at 8:45. It was cold waiting and we were thankful that the driver arrived at 9:10.
Once at our hotel in Rome we headed out for the HOHO (hop-on/hop-off) bus and did one loop of Rome, stopping at the Trevi Fountain for pictures and lunch. The fountain was very crowded and we had to push a bit to even get to the railing. If this is Rome during a non-peak time, I'd hate to be here during a peak time! It was very hard to get a picture of the fountain without a lot of heads in it, but with some creative cropping we did get this one picture.
As we walked back from the fountain we stopped at a local pizza parlor and had a nice lunch. It was a small place, but the food was excellent!
Our major mishap occurred after we got off the HOHO bus. I could not find the hotel! After waling a few blocks I checked my phone, but without a data plan could not access my Dropbox files. Finally one nice restaurant gave us their wifi password so I could access the hotel information and we go the street name and made it back. Lesson learned: When in a foreign country, always have you hotel address written out! I broke that rule and paid the price. Once back I scouted the area for a good restaurant and we had a nice meal of lasagna and Cannelloni with Gelato (Italian ice cream) for dessert.
We are safely back in our hotel and looking forward to the Vatican tour tomorrow afternoon.
2 comments:
You'll be able to remember the day they up-righted the Costa Concordia! You were only about 3 hours away! Too bad you weren't closer where you could get some photos :) Glad you got back to the hotel! Sylvia
Glad you survived the rough seas and getting lost in Rome! I'm sure those good meals in Rome helped make up for any problems you ran into.
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