June 26th

Today was our travel day, so we headed out for Rome at 11 am and played cards on the train for 4 hours. We took the metro and bus to Camping Roma, and were assigned to a three person mixed TENT not DORM like our reservation e-mail said, and Ryan tried to argue and got into a b****ing contest, but the people wouldn't budge. I ended up getting the lady to transfer us to a different tent and make it private (no random roomie) for the same price. To pitch our own tent would have saved us 20 cents per night, so we went with the tent that had a little more room. We have to use the showerhouse and there's no air temp control, it's very stuffy and there are no outlets to charge anything and the internet doesn't work there. UGH. Angry and upset, we started our laundry washing and bought a bottle of four roses from the supermarket for 14 euro :) Bourbon and coke made everything a little better and we played cards and yahtzee until it was time to change the laundry. After that, we started watching the US game at the bar and started talking to a cool guy named Bob who is a contractor from the US who has been working all over Europe, but it now in Varna, Bulgaria. He said it's really cheap there and they have nice beaches and it's not far from Thessaloniki. He's going to send us more info and we were invited to visit there and we might if we have time. Sounds kinda cool! We ate a great dinner at the restaurant at the campground while the US got knocked out of the World Cup. After that, we had lukewarm showers and went to sleep.

June 27th

This morning, I woke up at 8 am and started marking a map with info from our travel guide book while Ryan slept until 9. As I was reading, the book said that they close Appian Way to car traffic on Sundays and it's a nice little country bike ride. This made me look to see that today was Sunday (I usually have no clue what day it is) and so I made a mental note. I read further and looked to see that the Vatican Museum is only open M-Sat and was 13 euro, but it also open 9:30-12:30 on the last Sunday of the month and admission is FREE! I read this at 9:05 and by 9:20ish we were on a bus into Vatican City. Ryan was up and ready to go!! We got to the museum and the line was HUGE so we hopped in the back (wrapped almost around the entire block of the museum) and started our wait. Luckily the line moved relatively fast and we got into a conversation with a cool guy named Chris from the Gatlinburg area so we had a lot in common to talk about. That made the wait a lot easier. We got in at 11:30, an hour before the doors closed, and saw on a sign that they'd close the museum at 2 pm. We went straight to the Sistine Chapel (at the back of the museum - which took a lot of quick weave maneuvering to do) because we didn't want to miss that for sure! It was loud and crowded so we didn't get to stay very long, but we did get to sort of see it. Then we backtracked through the museum and saw the rest, which was pretty neat. We found a cool Van Gogh painting in a tiny offshoot room that no one ever went in because we wandered in and I looked at the painting and said "that is sooooo Starry Night in style and color" and then looked to see that it was a Van Gogh. Man, I'm getting good at this art stuff :) After seeing everything else, we went back to the chapel to go through and find the library. This time, I snuck some photos and then we left. We figure we passed through the "library" somehow, but whatever it was, it wasn't really a library.

We grabbed a quick lunch and headed to St. Peter's Basilica to go in (free). The line wasn't really that bad and man that was a big place! I think it might have been the massive amount of people, but other than Michelangelo's Pieta, we didn't think it was any better than the other churches we've been to. We had heard all this stuff about Vatican City basically being gold and we were certainly let down. We paid the 5 euro to go to the Cupola, and it was cool to look out over Rome, but the dome viewing part on the inside was certainly not as awesome as the Cupola we did in Florence. After the Basilica, we walked a little but then realized we were dog tired, so we headed back. The nearest metro was at the Spanish steps so we got to see them today. We have plans to enjoy a sunset/night dinner there.

We got back to the campground and we were so hot and disgusting that we figured a dip in the pool might be nice, but that ended with just relaxing in the shade by the pool. After that, our attempt at taking earlier and hopefully warmer showers ended worse than last night (icy cold and the echoes of squealing spanish teen girls) so now I'm wasting time in the internet building so the camera battery might charge some and blogging while Ryan is at the bar watching the soccer game. We haven't had dinner yet, but with a good sized dinner, we'll be about 28 euro under our small budget for the day, so we'll be upgrading to a bungalow like we had in Venice with electrical outlets and some sort of air control for tomorrow night. We're planning on hitting the Colosseum, Palatine Hill and The Roman Forum tomorrow :)

June 28th

This morning we woke up and headed out to the Colosseum. The metro stop exits out to a great view of it and we were certainly amazed! After waiting in line for a while, a worker came by and told us we could go straight to the front if we wanted to buy a guided tour (which we definitely did) so we got inside pretty quickly. The tour was good. The guide told us about how Nero's house used to stretch almost 360 around the Colosseum location, but of course the Colosseum didn't exist - it was a huge lake and to this day there is still a lake underneath it. The whole Colosseum was built in only 8 years, from 72-80 AD and for the opening, the emperor held 200 games in which 1,000 people and 5,000 animals were killed. The Colosseum was stripped of all it's marble and left with just the supporting brick structures and the marble was used to build St. Peter's Basilica. Later it was used as a military fort and suffered a lot of damage from bombings. There was also a period of time where the main floor was used as a marketplace for a community of people living in the archways of the first floor. Restorations started, if I remember correctly, in 1930 and only small parts were opened to the public after WW2 and entrance was free. Only in 1997 did they open more parts up and started raking in something like $54 million from the 4.5 million visitors the Colosseum sees every year. They had a cool gladiators exhibit and some things shown that they found while excavating the Colosseum including some marble slabs where people had drawn graffiti on while sitting at the games of the gladiators, their costumes, the animals they fought and even some gladiators' names. We thought the graffiti thing was pretty amazing. The Colosseum is pretty massive and was sooooooo cool.

Then we went on to the Roman Forum to see all the ruins. I really loved it there, but it was super hot with very little shade. The summer sky was gorgeous though and I think I got some great pictures! We went up and down every path to make sure we didn't miss anything and then went up to Palatine Hill through the gardens first. The gardens were awesome, but the ripe oranges in the tree were too far out of reach - I think they did that on purpose :( There were some great views of the Roman Forum and the Colosseum from up there. We got to Augustus' House and were totally amazed. What's left of the structures on Palatine Hill is completely unbelievable - there's just so much! Super tall buildings with many floors and really tall archways perfectly intact. At the edge of the ruins is a huge wall and you can look out onto the Circus Maximus. They were doing some sort of construction on it (or they don't maintain it well anyway) and I was pretty disappointed with it. I hope they do something to restore it because it's pretty big and still awesome! We did so much walking and most of it was in dust and gravel so after Palatine Hill when it was time to go home, we looked disgusting and our feet were so dark with dirt! We headed back to the campground and took showers (hot for the first time) and relaxed. We grabbed some pasta from the restaurant and played cards. For each hand of rummy won, the winner got a 30 second massage and our foot and calf rubs were certainly needed.

We decided to upgrade to a bungalow so that we can charge electronics easily, so we're doing that in the morning and will probably leave the campsite late so that we can have a later day to enjoy Rome at night.