travels, races, and other musings

London and Home We woke up on Saturday morning in London and I was still feeling awful. I dragged myself out of bed, took a hot steamy shower and we headed downstairs for breakfast. I thought I had booked us in hotels with included breakfast in all our European locations, however, apparently breakfast wasn't included in our London hotel and they wanted £11 each for continental breakfast. We decided with me not feeling well that we didn't want to run around trying to find breakfast in the cold drizzle so we gave in and ate at the hotel. We decided to head out to the Tower of London so we took the tube. When we arrived, we found that they wanted nearly £15 for admission and since we weren't going to spend too much time there, we decided that was too much and opted to jump back onto the sightseeing bus again. After awhile we hopped off and found a bite to eat for lunch before heading back to the hotel to check out and take the long tube ride back to Heathrow. It turns ...

London So I suppose this isn't the Italy travel journal any more since I'm about to tell you about London, but Italy was the bulk of our vacation so I'm sticking to my title. We had to get up really early to make our 7:50 AM flight to London. I was feeling no better than I was the day before. In fact, I felt worse. The taxi picked us up at 5:45 for our only taxi ride of our vacation. At 45 Euros it certainly was an expensive ride, but there was really no other way to get to the airport that early in the morning. We arrived at the airport in what, I'm sure was record time. On the way, the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla went by in a blur. We also drove past what looked like an aqueduct. What we were told was a 30 minute drive was actually 20 minutes, but the taxi driver drover like a bat out of hell. He was insane. Thank goodness we had seat belts (though evidently he didn't feel the need to wear his). By the time we got to the airport and waited in line ...

Rome Our second day in Rome dawned and I had a sore throat. Uh oh. I just barely skirted a sickness before we left (I either wasn't sick or kicked it). Well, maybe it was just a dry throat. We planned to spend the morning in Vatican City at St. Peter's basilica and the Vatican Museum. We took the metro down and started in St. Peter's square. It was actually much smaller than I had thought it would be. I remembered seeing the images on TV of all those people crammed in the square (though it's actually round) after the pope died. It is a large area, but there were just so many people! It wasn't so busy when we were there, thankfully. We got into the line to get into the basilica. We had to go through a security checkpoint. It had to be the worst crowd organization I've ever seen. There was one big mash of people, probably 10 heads across squeezing down into two security screens. The problem was that with such a big area for the "line" people wou...

Rome We got up early and headed out to the the area where all the major archaeological sites are. We had a lot on our agenda, but luckily, most of the sites are very close together. When we came up the stairs from the metro (subway) I got my first glimpse of the Colosseum. All I can say is, wow. I knew it was big, but it is seriously huge and imposing. I can only imagine how the Romans felt upon seeing it since they weren't used to huge stadiums (like we are today). After I was done staring at the Colosseum, our first stop was Domus Aurea, the great palaces built by Emperor Nero after fire destroyed most of the city. Rumor has it that Nero was behind the fires so that he could clear out parts of the city for his palace. Later, after Nero was killed the area was filled in and buildings were built on top of the site to remove the stain of Nero. The palace is now in the process of being excavated and preserved. The scale is miraculous and it's beyond the imagination to imagi...