Hit the ground running!

Well, we made it safely to Rome after a grueling 9 hour flight. One thing not to do when flying to Italy....go coach. Unless you are shorter than 5'8 there is not enough room for you to sit straight behind the seat in front of you. Heaven forbid that the person in front reclines their seat!!! I had a friend tell me there was more room on these big planes. I beg to differ....there is less! You can imagine how much sleep my 6'3, 6'5" and 6'2" boys got on the plane. The upside was that it was a pretty smooth flight and we had our own personal TV screen to watch our favorite movies or TV shows!

Anyway, on to the good stuff. We landed and our walk through the passport check took about 10 minutes. The girl didn't hardly take a glance at our passports. I bought a flexi euro rail pass for the family, so we are all on the same ticket. This was a good choice because we are traveling together everywhere, so you save a good bit of money. I read in my handy dandy Frommer's book for Italy about the Lenardo express train to the Roma Termini and that worked out great also. We hit the ground and went right to the Leonardo Express train and arrived at the Roma Termini in about 25 minutes. It was a 3-5 minute walk to the Hotel Morgana that I booked through Priceline and it is perfect. It's close location to the termini makes it a great 'base' from Rome. And oh....did I mention that the Termini has a mall?!

Our rooms weren't ready, so we went and had a bite at a cute 'fast food' Italian place right near the hotel. Got our bags in the room around 1pm. We took a 30 minute nap, then off to our tour or the Catacombs and the ancient Roman countryside. Of course we decided to walk to the meeting point and the nice locals gave us some good directions. They had us going in circles! I'm thinking that they are at home laughing tonight talking about how they gave some Americans the wrong directions!;-) We thought that we were going to miss the tour because they said they would not wait more than 5 minutes. We got there 6 minutes late and....the Roman gods must have been with us...we made it! It was a great tour. We did a 'skip the line' tour. That was a good way to go because we had 0 wait time when we arrived at our destinations. Our tour guide Alex(andria) did a great job.

After that, we jumped on the metro for a ride back to the hotel. We stopped and had a quick supper, dropped the boys off at the hotel to go to sleep, then Ted and I went after a gelato. Now I can go to sleep. We calculated that we were up for 31 hours!

Tomorrow is our tour of the Colosseum! I have kept it a secret as to how we will be traveling on that tour. Stay tuned and I will fill you in tomorrow.

Oh, I took some pictures with my phone and tried to do some mobile uploads but they didn't work. I will try something different tomorrow to try and add some pictures!