Buongiorno from Rome! 12/12 and13/18

On 12/11 we started our long anticipated trip to Italy for my 70th birthday. Sarah is with us and Jonathan and Ryan will join us on 12/22. I say long anticipated because if you want good seats using frequent flyer miles you have to start 330 days in advance. So I booked these tickets January 18, 2018.

Travel always involves hitches of one sort or another. While we congratulated each other for having a flight that left in the late afternoon and avoided the dreaded fog, we forgot that the plane taking us to Rome was supposed to arrive in the morning. So that plane gets diverted to Las Vegas and we are delayed enough to miss our connecting flight from London to Rome. British Airways handled the situation well and, Pilats, we handled it the best we could.

John managing the stress of waiting
Sarah productively wasting time

After securing our rental car we drive the 12 miles to a local airport hotel in Ostia and crash. Funny thing about booking a hotel in Europe is that you are never actually sure of what it will be like. For instance, I booked a single room for Sarah and a double room for us. This is what we got, two rooms!

We used the second room as an extension to our tiny closet!

Breakfast is always an adventure too. Since none of us slept past around 4 AM we were the early birds at breakfast. Maybe in Germany when they say breakfast at 7AM, it is there and ready to go. In Italy it is more of a process that starts at 7AM. But we find more than enough to eat. They even have scrambled eggs! Mostly though it is heavy on sweets and meat.

Protein breakfast

Today we are off to Viterbo and Orte before landing in Orvieto for the next three nights. We have an unfortunate rainy day. Here’s a picture from the wet balcony of the hotel in Ostia looking out over the Tyrrhenian Sea.  More later.

View from our hotel