Day 1
Dear Adventure Avenue,
We left very early (3am!) on Christmas Day to head to LAX.
We took our first flight to Philadelphia. Luckily we had lounge access so we had a place to hangout for our layover. They had some soup in the lounge that was quite good.
My brother and dad went and found a pizza place (because I guess they thought they weren’t going to get enough in Italy 🤪 😂) Unfortunately, 15 minutes before we were going to leave, someone went out the emergency exit, starting an ear-piercing alarm. As we were leaving to go to our gate, they turned it off.
Our second flight to Rome was longer. We got dinner and breakfast. I watched an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and slept a few hours.
Rome
Then we landed in Rome on December 26 at around 8:30 am. We were able to take a taxi for our whole group (6 people) to our hotel, the Tribune. It’s a Hyatt property.
Our rooms were not ready yet, so we left our bags with the front desk and went exploring!
We first got my dad a coffee at the Bar down the road (that’s also a tabac store as indicated by a T). Then we proceeded to get turned around with the map they gave us at the hotel and got slightly lost. However, once my mom started Google mapping our location, we found our way to the Hop on, Hop Off bus stop.
As we were fairly tired from the plane ride but wanting to become acclimated to the time here, we just sat on the bus for the whole trip. Apparently, the Big Bus is better than the other buses, which judging off the map, it does look like it’s longer and hits more things.
Big Bus Stops
We got on at the Ludovisi/Spanish Steps stop. Then we went to the barberini/Trevi Fountain and saw that from the bus.
The next stop was the train / bus terminal. We sat on the bus for a while there, but that was fine.
The next stops were:
The Basilica
The Colosseum
Circus Maximus – This was pretty cool! It was a horse race area in its past life, but now it’s a park.
Piazza Venezia
Vatican – We didn’t get very close to this, but looks like there are other buses that get closer to it.
Then we drove through the Villa Borghese which was very green and sparked our interest.
My family got back off at the Spanish steps stop (though we didn’t see then) and then started walking back to the hotel. We stopped at a Pizzeria called Il Fiammifero Strano which was on our way back from the bus stop to the hotel.
I had just plain ol spaghetti with red sauce, my dad had a pizza with egg, artichokes, and a ham like meat on it. My brother had cheese pizza and my mom had lasagna.
We then headed back to the room to rest for a bit. Everyone but me took a nap. When my dad woke up, we decided to go for a walk in the Villa Borghese park that we saw earlier.
Villa Borghese Park
Over the course of the walk, we discovered the dog park!
We also passed by the lake where people were rowing boats.
On our way back, we passed by the Christmas World. Everyone was going there.
When we got back to the hotel, we were tired and getting hungry, so we had a very early (in Italian standards) dinner at the rooftop restaurant in our hotel. So early in fact, that we couldn’t eat off the dinner menu. We instead had to order off the bar menu because dinner doesn’t start til 7.
For dinner, I had a margarita pizza and gelato for dessert.
After dinner, we retired to our rooms where we quickly went to bed.
Until tomorrow,
A
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