Rome
October 1 ~ 3, 2017
October 1
Our cruise ended at the
Roman port of Civitavecchia. From there we took a VERY expensive taxi ride to
our hotel in Rome, where we arrived at noon. Since the hotel was
only a mile from the Vatican, we decided to walk there right away.
October 2
Rather than spending a fortune on taxi
cabs around Rome, we decided to try our luck with the Roman subway system.
This subway was reasonably priced and would take us anywhere in Rome that we
wanted to visit. Our only problem was that all the directions around the
various stations were in Italian, so we had a difficult time finding our way
around. In spite of this, we managed to see everything we wanted to see
without getting lost.
We visited the Trevi Fountain and the Roman Colosseum. We arrived at Trevi at 9:00 AM, only to find that the fountain was being cleaned. We found a policeman who told us that the cleaning would be finished at 11:00 AM, so we decided to wait while taking pictures of the fountain and of all the coins that were being vacuumed up. At 11:00 AM another policeman told us that the cleaning had been delayed until 1:00 PM. Since this day would be our only chance to see the Roman Colosseum, we decided to leave. This was a disappointment to us for sure, but OTOH the fountain did photograph very nicely, even though the water was not pumping.
October 3
We left Rome, unable to see
anything else because of our early flight departure. On that note, TSA in
the U.S. advises passengers to be at the airport 2 hours early. In Rome we
were told that we should be there 3 hours early. We actually arrived 4
hours early, and were glad we did so. The airport was so congested and so
disorganized that if we had arrived an hour later we would have missed our
flight!
An interesting side note ~ every winter Bill manages to catch bronchitis. Although the outdoor weather was very comfortable, the temperature in the ship was Arctic! Because of this Bill managed to come down with a case of bronchitis about the same time as we docked in Rome. That's the bad news. The good news is that we stopped at a Roman pharmacy where without a prescription we were able to purchase an ample dose of antibiotics for the Euro equivalent of about $5 US dollars. This is about 15% of what the same Rx would cost in the US, which sort of illustrated to Bonnie and I that the US pharmaceutical companies are robbing us blind! :(
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