There are few friends who are aware of the chaos that Dick and I went through last week and a few have also experienced the same travel trauma though maybe not at the same level we did. Currently Dick is denying anything has happened. Funny, funny man.
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| Waiting to board at SFO |
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| Front view of Lufthansa A380 |
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| Not a great overview of the A380 |
So what am I referring to you ask. Well let's just say that you can replace a lost passport in 24 hrs in San Francisco. We were suppose to fly out on August 14th and arrive in Rome on the 15th but instead we arrived on 19th. And neither of us was ready for the level of humidity that we are currently experiencing. And for those who have had Italian clients know that this is the state sanctioned vacation time for Italy so not all of the stores or restaurants are opened. The traffic is also very light but that doesn't mean that there aren't any tourists in town. Rome is rather full of large tour groups and many Italians are in those groups.
So here we are back in Rome the eternal city for the fourth time and will be back again in October. Very little has changed since we were here 3 years ago-the streets are still littered, beggars are every where, and there is dog poop on the sidewalks but hey the pasta, pizza, wine, and other delicious food is still available.
We usually take the first couple of days easy to get use to the time change but this time we are using the first 4 days to do that and get the rest of the stuff done that we would normally do in 7 days. With the humidity and the noisy young folks in the hostel across the street we are not getting the sleep we had hoped for but I feel better today which is a good thing as we have lots of ground to cover the next three days.
But we did accomplish one thing that we have not been very successful during our other Rome trips and that was to get photos of Piazza Navona. The last two times the photos were taken but somehow got deleted off the computer. Even this time there were a few little issues but here they are:
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| Fontana del Moro |
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| Fontana del Moro |
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| Fontana del Moro |
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| Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi |
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| Fontana quattro fumi |
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| Dove on top of the obelisk at Fontana quattro fumi |
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| Fontana del Nettuno |
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| Fontana del Nettuno |
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| Sant'Agnese in Agone |
And of course to get back to our B&B we had to stop by the Pantheon to again and of course we got to see the large number of tour groups. Several groups were from a Disney cruise ship. Yes there is a port for Rome and it a bit out of the area but Cittavecchia is where the ships pull in a disgorge hundreds of passengers.
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| Hot and tired tourists |
And along the way we also stopped to admire the lovely colors and other architectural details fund all over this city.
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| Piazza della pilotta |
So tomorrow we head to Salerno to revisit Paestum where there are three large, well preserved Greek temples. Then we continue the Amalfi portion of our trip by ferry to Sorrento.
