When in Rome...

Today we met my mom and dad in Rome, Italy for a 10 day adventure in Rome and on a Mediterranean cruise. We met up at the airport and found our way on the Leonardo Express train into Rome's Termini train station. After getting a little lost walking out of the train station and witnessing a homeless woman taking a pee on the curb of a busy street and wipe herself off with a newspaper, we found our B&B in central Rome.

We stayed at Gulliver's Lodge which was an easy 10 minute walk from the main train station and only a 15 minute walk from the Colosseum. It was a bit hard to find at first because it was actually in a residential building and the only sign was 1 cm x 3 cm on the panel that we had to use to ring ourselves in.

We got ourselves settled in with our host who didn't speak a whole lot of English but did fairly well. His wife runs the B&B but she was in the hospital 8 months pregnant and having complications. After getting settled in and cooled down we headed out for a really late lunch just down the street and was was called a Snack Bar - Panni's and pasta and real Coca-Cola!!!

Since we were all pretty tired from our trips, we decided to tackle something close by and we walked down to the Colossem. It was such an amazing structure and it seemed so weird just walking around a corner of a busy street and seeing it for the first time.

We didn't take a guided tour since I was offering the free "read from my tour book" tour. These people who try to sell us extra tours obviously don't have small children and know that it is about impossible for us to keep up with a tour group with them.

Here is Addison with Grandpa Jeff hanging out inside the Roman Colosseum.

The Colosseum had the capacity to seat 50,000 and standing room for another 10K people. It was started in 75 AD and built by 40,000 Hebrew slaves over a 5 year period. The ruins are in still in pretty good shape for being almost 2000 years old. The arena floor where the gladiators fought is no longer there but you can see the tunnels and places that warriors, animals and slaves were kept to participate in the Roman "entertainment".

We actually caught a cast of the musical "CATS" doing a photo shoot along with a few performances of songs from the show as well. What a double treat.

Of course after some time in the colosseum we had to get refreshed and try some of our first Italian gelato ice cream. Addison was finally in heaven.

My mom and dad in front of the colosseum.

We took a walk around the rest of grounds and up around the Palentine Hill. There were lots of olive trees and you could see were lots of people including my mother grab the low hanging ones for a little snack.

Ancient Rome at sunset. We did a lot of walking around and I can tell you that the earlier Romans had to have really bad back problems because their "ancient" roads are so bumpy with the huge rocks they have laid down. Maybe I just noticed it more because I had to push the stroller extra slow as to not knock my children's head all over in the stroller.