On Tuesday we had plans to go to Rome. Brandi and Ryan had been there before and Jayden still had school and Ryan had work so they didn’t go with us. We were on our own in Rome. I had preplanned a lot of stuff. I had purchased our train tickets from Milan to Rome months in advance. We had an AirBnB booked. I also got our tickets for the Colosseum and the Vatican way ahead of time.

Brandi got Jayden off to school and then we all got ready. She was going to help us get to the train station. We had to walk to the metro, take the metro to the train terminal and then wait and get on our train. Once at the train station she left and went back to her place and we went into the terminal. They only release 15 minutes prior to departure what platform your train is on so we had sometime to just wait.

While waiting we got asked by the Polizia (police) for all our passports. A couple of guys came up to us dressed in plain clothes. We weren’t sure they were a real deal but one pulled out a badge. We were doing nothing wrong but it’s always scary to get stopped by police for any reason. They scanned all of our passports and let us go.

We opted for the high speed train. The tickets were more but it would only be a 3 hour ride vs. 9 on the standard train. Plus one of Greg’s requests for the trip was to be able to go on a high speed train.

Once on the train it was very comfortable – even though we had to wear N95 masks the whole time. These mask were required for any transportation in Italy and many of the sites. Thank goodness just before we got there they dropped the requirement for masks outside, that would of made it much less enjoyable.

We did get to see some of the country but it went by fast and a lot of time we were in tunnels – so you don’t see as much as you would hope. It is still an amazing way to travel though. I WISH they had this in the US. Could you imagine if we could go from Boise to Portland in a bit over 2 hours? I would go there all the time.

The max speed we traveled was 300 kilometers per hour which is about 185 miles per hour. Pretty fast!

When we got to Rome we had to get to our AirBnB to meet the host. We didn’t have much time and we were all pretty hungry so we just found something to eat inside the terminal real quick. They didn’t have much so we ended up at Five Guys. Just couldn’t believe we were in Rome and our first meal was an American burger but it is what it is. They had a sign there quoting our home town newspaper! All the way across the world and we find something of Idaho.

Google maps told us that the walk to our AirBnB was about 30 minutes, that didn’t seem so bad but it was horrible. The roads were pretty up and down and they had shut down almost every road we tried to go down. There was one building with security outside of it and police all around it. They had also shut down any road near it and kept redirecting us down other roads. We looked it up later and it was the Chigi Palace which is the seat of the Council of Ministers and the official residence of the Prime Minister of Italy. We figured he must of been there or someone very important was there because of all the security.

It ended up taking us over an hour to walk to our AirBnB. We were just glad to finally be there. We let the host know we were there. They had a woman who lived in the building come down and let us in. She spoke ZERO English but was very sweet. We had a hard time communicating with her. Some how we managed though and settled in. The AirBnB was nice but smaller than it seemed from pictures and the beds upstairs were tiny. The 3 that were up there were short, event the kids were longer than the beds. There was no way my brother was going to fit on them. He ended up sleeping on the coach – which was not comfortable.

Once we got settled in and caught our breath we ventured out. We went to Piazza Navona. It was very close to our AirBnB. It was beautiful! There were 3 fountains, a beautiful church and some shops and restaurants.

The first fountain we saw was Fountain of Neptune. It features Neptune fighting with an octopus.

The second fountain we saw was Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Fountain of the Four Rivers). From Wikipedia: The base of the fountain is a basin from the centre of which travertine rocks rise to support four river gods and above them, a copy of an Egyptian obelisk surmounted with the Pamphili family emblem of a dove with an olive twig. Collectively, they represent four major rivers of the four continents through which papal authority had spread: the Nile representing Africa, the Danube representing Europe, the Ganges representing Asia, and the Río de la Plata representing the Americas.

Also in the Piazza was this beautiful church, Sant’Agnese in Agone

The 3rd fountain is Fontana del Moro. It represents a Moor, or African (perhaps originally meant to be Neptune), standing in a conch shell, wrestling with a dolphin, surrounded by four Tritons

We did go in the church and it was beautiful but there were no pictures allowed.

We went into the Gladiator museum in the Piazza. It was free and pretty interesting.

I like all the weird details. Some of the faces on things were just strange.

We were walking down the street looking for somewhere to eat and a guy stopped us and seemed friendly so we went in the restaurant. After we were in and seated he told us he didn’t have any pizza because the guy who does the pizza was not there. We all found something else we could eat so we stayed. I thought the food was pretty good. We had bruschetta as an appetizer. It was nice that they had different kinds for us to try. We also got a try of fried foods, from fried rice to fried cauliflower. Most of it was pretty good too. You know the saying When in Rome do as the Romans do, so that’s what we did just tried it all!

It was a great first day in Rome!