Some photos En Route and Arrival in Rome

Here we are all ready to go at about 5:30AM from Seattle. Don.t we look chipper?

By the way, Daddy, Emma wanted her hair cut before we left. It was a quick job at 5AM, but she looks like a pixie again, which isn.t a bad thing. Maybe next month Michael can tidy it up for her, since he is the resident hairdresser.

It was a very long day of travelling. In all, it was 27 hours of travelling with a rather difficult night.s sleep the night before and only about 3 hrs of pretty good sleep en route. Basil got a bit more.

Basil with his cute little backpack boarding the plane. And then keeping busy like a good boy at the airport. He ran around that fountain about 100 times.

Arrival at our hotel. The "view" out our window.

Sorry for the sideways photos. I.ll try to figure that out later. This is the street we are on, which was so hard for the taxi driver to find. Small wonder. I could never have found it.

This is the building across the street from us, and looks similar to our own front door. It looks worse from the outside than it does from the inside. As my friend Kathy wrote: 3 cheers for Grandma Coco!! I was remembering last night how my Dad.s first comment to Mom after her announcement that she wanted to come with us: "This isn.t going to be the kind of travel you.ve ever done before. It.s not going to be a cruise." Travelling this way is what is allowing us to make this trip, anyway. We couldn.t afford a lot of the touristy places. Rome is a very expensive city, and most especially there.

Although the neighborhood does look rough, it doesn.t feel that way to me. Lots of college kids and a true working class neighborhood. It is so much more fun to be with real Italians than with a bunch of tourists like us. We have plenty of that society en route from one place to another. We went out and had our first Italian "fast food" last night which was about 12 kinds of different pizza we just pointed at to order. Here is Grandma enjoying a piece and probably talking about that taxi driver. It was great. I had something with eggplant and some spicy little pockets, maybe some anchovy. The rest had plain cheese. Our host Dominic was very helpful and got us all set up with great maps for the local busses. Our room is very comfortable.

Here is a not-great view of our room. It is actually very nice and the beds were comfortable. We all went to bed at 10pm and we all woke up around 3-4 AM basically ready to get up, especially Basil. We all snoozed until about 5AM and have been getting ready this morning. Lots of night noise, especially traffic but also people cheering now and then probably from a local taverna. It didn.t really quiet down until about 2AM.

Our digits and limbs tally is not the greatest, but it could be worse. Mom's (HEY I just found the apostrophe! Yea!) finger was worse this morning and we did some small operations on it. We've salved it with antibiotic ointment from the pharmacist and St. John's holy oil. My leg-foot is doing very well. Both kids have all fingers and toes intact. We are off to say prayers and then out into Rome!

Signing off at 7AM in a muggy but not hot, graffiti-filled Rome.