What A Night

Many of you who will be reading this already have an idea of what happened to Kristen and I as we began our journey to Italy. First, we soaked up the high life in the President's Club at IAH, drinking wine and eating donuts at 9 a.m. Then after a promising start, "weather" delays caused our flight boiund for Newark to circle four times over Virginia and then land in Baltimore because we were apparently out of fuel. We went from being the first in line to land in Newark to being the fifth in line to leave Baltimore. To make things even better, once we landed in Newark we were told that our flight had already left and that we were going to have to take an 8:30 p.m. flight to London with a connection to Rome putting us there at 6 p.m. the next day. This is where Kristen and her new friend, Caroline, took over.

I really can't go into the details, but let's just say that we were on a 10:10 p.m. flight bound for Rome in no time. We made our way through customs, a bit of a joke, walked up and down in front of the train station trying to guess which villa or via or whatever we were supposed to take to our hotel and ultimately paid 10 euros for a 5 minute taxi ride. It saved our marriage. Kidding.

We then caught the metro to the Colosseum and toured one of the greatest monuments in human history for the better part of two hours. The Colosseum is indescribable and has to be seen to be fully appreciated. After leaving the Colosseum, we walked through Palantine Hill, The Roman Forum and watched a number of people get married at various churches along the way.

Mom, you would never survive here. The cokes around the Colloseum are 4 euro a piece. That's right, a six dollar coke. That makes you broke REAL fast. After drinking our twelve dollars in coke, we went down to The Forum and it's AMAZING. There in the middle of this modern city is antiquity just sitting there. There is so much in this one little space I think you could spend a day here just studying. We plan to go back tomorrow and take the guided tour of all the temples. Another cool thing about Rome. At home we have sign posts or maybe the occasional street light. Here it's basically you wanna go, you just walk. So we've almost taken out a couple of vespas and gotten hit by a few cars, but we're learning.

We're off to go eat gnocchi at a cafe and take a stroll around Trevi Fountain (where your quarter will go in) and The Pantheon at night. CIAO!!!