Bill-on-the-Hill

The final two days of this trip can be summarized as "roam Rome, go home." After close to two weeks of decidedly unconventional tourist activity, this was the time to do some more mainstream things in the Eternal City -- with an emphasis on "stream," as in "streams of water," as in you wouldn't believe how much it rained.

Most of our time was spent in the Colosseo district, seeing the classic sights -- the Forum, Constantine's Arch, Circus Maximus, and of course, the Colosseum itself, of which more shortly. However, once again I'd bowed to the wishes of WGMIL and arranged to join a packaged tour group for part of the day, and this turned out to have some minor drawbacks. The problem wasn't the tour operator themselves; they were just fine, and as at Naples, saved us logistical wrangling and struggles with our limited Italian vocabulary. Rather, the issue was that we'd locked in on a particular tour time well before arrival, and had then been unnecessarily conservative in the time we allowed to get to the starting point for the tour from our hotel (remember, we'd stayed at the airport -- this because of an early flight out the next morning). The consequence was that we had quite a bit more time to wander downtown-but-not-ancient Rome before the tour started.

So why is this a problem, rather than an asset? Well, three reasons. First, I don't know that I have ever in my life met two more shopping-phobic women than my wife and mother-in-law. To get either of them into a boutique or even a commercial art gallery (which is remarkable as they're both very inclined toward visual art) just about requires physical coercion. In many settings, of course, this is a good thing; it's really nice to go on a trip with Emily and know that we won't be coming home with a bunch of what-did-you-get-THAT-for tourist trinkets bought to satisfy a shopping addiction. In this particular setting, however, this commendable trait turned out to be a problem because of the second thing: we were there on a Monday, and most of the museums (and note, both WGMIL and Emily love art museums, just not art shops) in Rome close on Mondays. Add to this the third factor, uncooperative weather, and we had a real problem filling the time -- and a torrential downpour to keep us from filling it the way we would have preferred to, namely seeing "outdoors" sights.

Fortuitously, the rains stopped in early afternoon, just in time for us to join the tour group, although not in time to keep us from getting drenched despite good rainwear. (We left an extra tip at the adequate-but-unexceptional pizzeria near the Forum where we had lunch and took refuge from the downpour, simply because of the amount of water we deposited in the place, and we weren't the only ones.) This particular tour covered the sights of "ancient" Rome; far better photographers than I have captured its glories on e-film, but I do want to show one otherwise unspectacular photo to illustrate a charming feature of the tours:

Notice the little splash of color at the lower left? That's the tour guide's umbrella -- used not to keep the rain off (by now it had stopped raining), but rather to make it easier to keep track of "our" tour guide among the zillions of similar tour groups wandering the Forum and vicinity, each of which had their own guide carrying a distinctively colored umbrella. Seeing all these parasols on parade added a curiously festive touch to the crowd, and it really did make it easier for us to stay with our guide, who spoke excellent English using a wireless earphone setup that worked quite well. Once again, we could have done this on our own, but going with the tour group did add to our enjoyment of the ruins. We just wish we hadn't had to wait through a downpour before linking up with them! And that of course is not their fault.

And so back to the hotel for their excellent but expensive dinner buffet (we'd decided to forego local color for the last night there, in favor of simplicity), then out the next morning. Of the flight home, there's not much to say, except that we had an amusing small-world encounter in the Atlanta airport, about 1500 miles from home. Emily says that I could run into somebody I know on the surface of the moon, and there's something to her opinion; I've run into acquaintances in the American embassy in Moscow, out-of-the-way European airports (best man in our wedding, in fact), obscure hiking trails in Hawaii, even on a trail coming out of the Grand Canyon after an overnight backpack -- in the dead of winter. But even I was taken aback when, during our layover before flying home to Albuquerque, we ran into a former secretary of mine, chaperoning a church group on the way to Rome. Well, I hope they had better weather than we did...

So that's the trip. One more blog entry in this series will follow, as I review some of the outfits we dealt with, and then it's back to blogging more pedestrian travel in the U S of A.