Roma III

I typed out all this blog stuff yesterday in the van driving back to A&C's from Paris. Now I am sitting in their computer room loading it all into or blog online. I wish I could add sound to this. John is sitting next to me serenading me with his mandolin playing! :-)

Our final day in Rome was busy; we had a lot left that we wanted to see before we left Italy. We started with the Vatican. St. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel. The lines weren’t too bad. The bummer was that you walk through tons of Chapels and different rooms before finally coming to the Sistine Chapel. Again, no pictures are allowed but by now,

you know how that goes…

The staircase on the way out is gorgeous!

After that we stopped for pizza and gelato, can you ever have too much of this stuff???
Next stop, the Colloseum! It was fascinating to walk through. We had read a little from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs about Christians that were martyred here in Rome. It’s sobering to realize the numbers of people that died here.

Overlooking the Roman Forum

Walking back to our apartment, we stopped by the Mammertime
Prison where it is said that Paul and Peter were held.

We stopped off at a local market where John picked up supplies for dinner. We decided it was time to go cheap and make it on our own since we had the apartment with stove and pans etc. Boy do we wish we had done this sooner! I think the total cost was about 15 euros. Well below our average dinner cost, even at the cheap street vendors! He met a wonderful man who told him what to get and how to fix it. We had B-something-celli pasta, sauce, bread, and wonderful Italian sausage! We were all excited to taste Dad’s fantastic-o good-bye Italy dinner! This is where the checker gave us the “Mama Mia” exclamation upon realizing all 6 were our own children!

I had three paragraphs typed out about this next bit of drama and decided to simplify. The check we had written for the apartment ended up being to the wrong person. We had used the other check so I had to go with a couple to pay for the apartment. After a few failed suggestions and 45min. down the hill while John made dinner, we ended up paying it with our credit card and paying the 4% fee that they would incur. After being gone for so long, I decided that it was worth it just to be done with the ordeal. I arrived back at the apartment just in time for the wonderful dinner John had prepared.

It was a great ending and just about my favorite part of Rome.

This is Jarod and Laura posing with their medallions from Sunday School, we knew they wouldn’t survive being packed. Jarod, of course, chose English while Laura chose Italian. Jenna helped write them in class. Don’t they look quite chipper for it being about 3:15am? We set our alarm for 3am that morning to walk down the hill and call a taxi from a pay phone. This was the smoothest execution of any of our plans for Rome. We cleaned up, loaded up, and headed down the hill at about 3:30am. We called the two taxis which arrived while I was still on the phone! It was 15 euros each, 30 total euros to get all 8 of us to the Termini train station to catch the bus for Rome Ciampano airport. We arrived there about 4am, got on the bus at 4:15am and headed to the airport. We checked in on time with no problems, boarded our plane and were off to Paris by 6:45am. John and I are continually in awe at how well the kids are doing. There has been very little whining and complaining, just a few moments from Laura but what more can you expect from a 4 year old? All in all, they’ve been fantastico!