Italy Day 5... July 3rd

Day 39...

will catch up tonight

Italy Day 4... July 2nd

Day 38...

A series of Unfortunate Events!!!

Today was the train ride from Venice to Rome, and it definitely didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. The train we needed to catch for the cheapest price left at 920 am, however, there was 7 of us and for some reason that was way more difficult then it needed to be. I left for the train station alone, hoping I could get some of the tickets and the rest of us would just go straight over to the plat form. Well not everyone was at the station by 9 15 so we could actually get on the train, so we were cutting it extremely close. We ended up buying the tickets and basically running over to the plat form. Barely made the train due to it running late, otherwise we would have most definitely missed it. Our tickets were for standing, keep in mind we had all over our luggage today, so it was more like standing room for 14 of us. We finally got situated on the train between first class and standard, when one of the train conductor people told us we couldn’t sit in the first class walk way so we had to cram us all into the extremely small space in Coach. We all were pretty use to people climbing over or around us to get on and off the train by the third stop. This train was to just take us to Florence because the plan was to get off in Florence and spend a few hours in Florence then get back on the train and head to Rome. Part of the train ride it was get to know eachother better talks, and the rest everyone but myself fell asleep on the floor of the train while I caught up on these lovely blogs.

We got off the train in Florence, and I was pretty excited, because I was planning on finding me some amazing Italian Leather. Well this was the second major mishap of the day. The lockers were not available because today is a Saturday or something like that, but it automatically made for an extremely irritated group because we decided that we would take shifts, and then after that part of my group decided that they didn’t want to take shifts so they were just going to stay and wait, while a few of us made a quick one hour look so then we could all make the train. Unfortunately, at that point I really didn’t like this idea, but I went with it.

Mary, Dani and I walked down a few streets in Florence when we came to the realization that either everything was closed, or it was just to far away for us to just do in a quick hour, so we headed back to the train station where everyone else was waiting. The last train ride wasn’t near as bad as the first. At least we all had seats for this one, we were just extremely spread out between cars. This train reminded me more of the train on Harry Potter than any other train I have been on, the seats were arranged 6 per section throughout the entire thing. This train was much easier for me to sleep on then the one this morning.

When we arrived in Rome, the first thing we wanted to do was find our hotel. Fortunately we picked one close by so it would be easy to access the train station from. The first thing we run into was LDS Missionaries, and Maddie even knew one of them; it was like our group just found heaven or something. They were really nice guys and they tried to help us out but no luck. We knew what street it was off of and the general direction so we headed that way. Dreaming Roma is where Dani, Mary and I were to be staying and for some reason we passed it and didn’t even realize it. When we finally found it, we went up stairs to talk to the owner, and he had no idea who we were, spoke no English, and somehow informed us that he had no available rooms. Yep… Just my luck for today. We walked down to where the other half of the group was staying and I asked there hotel and they didn’t have any either. Fortunately the one next to them did.

After we resolved our whole hotel issue, everyone was starving. We ate at a place close to us and it really did have good pizza, and of course sense we are in Italy we had to continue our Gelato excursion and we walked down a few blocks and found an amazing gelato place!!! Everyone pampered themselves with at least 3 scoops.

~Unfortunate Events~

Elyse