Hello from Civitavecchia, Italy (Upload delayed one week).
Drafted Sunday Afternoon – July 7, 2019 (Second post of this travelogue)
***Uploaded 7/14/19. As noted in a previous post, the ship wi-fi broadband was very slow downloading with almost zero upload bandwidth. Simple messages could be uploaded, but pictures failed to send. Very frustrating.***
We are on the ship (Royal Carribbean “Jewel of the Seas”) in the port of Civitavecchia. The port is perhaps 70 miles from the heart of Rome. We took a private car (actually a wonderful van) and it took us over an hour to get here and cost 130 Euro.
Now, I will try to catch up on some observations about our time in Rome. As I mentioned in the first post, we were on the second floor of a building in the center of historic Rome and also the center of evening activity. There we perhaps 30 restaurants (with outside seating) within a short walking distance. That was the good news. The so-so news is that our apartment was over a bar that played loud music from about 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM. Shown below is a tray in the apartment with ear plugs {big grin}. I noted previously that the noise did not keep us from sleeping.
The bathroom in the Rome apartment was a bit strange (see photo). When you used the toilet, you had to have one foot in the shower floor.
From our last post you saw a picture of the restaurant taken from our window. Next to the restaurant seating was an area where several folks were playing chess (see picture). The fellow on the right brought the chess table and seemed to be the person to beat. They were there each day starting around 1:00 and stayed for several hours. The tree in the photo is a fig tree.
eral hours.
All of the streets in the area are cobble stone (see photo). Some areas had stones missing and walking was a bit of a challenge for us old folks.
I mentioned that we spent quite a bit of time touring Rome in 2008. We made that trip with Pat’s cousin and her husband. For that trip we rented an apartment in the same general area. As a part of one of our strolls, we located the 2008 apartment. For documentation purposes the address for the 2008 apartment was Via Dei Cappellari 60 (GPS: 41.896916,12.4697828). Our apartment address this year was: Piazza del Fico, 22. (GPS: 41.899460, 12.470623).
