July 10, 2015

We spent the past two days doing a TON of walking around the city of Rome.  It is definitely an amazing place with a lot of really cool stuff to see.  Like everyone else, our primary focus was to see the Coliseum and Roman Forum while eating as much awesome food as we could possibly find!  🙂

It has been miserably hot the entire time that we have been here (nearly 100 degrees), so we decided to spend a couple of half days out in the city instead of a long day.  It actually ended up working out pretty well for us.  We got into town at about 9:00 am for the past 2 days, walked around for a while, stopped for lunch, walked some more, stopped for ice cream, then headed back to the pool at the camp ground.

Yesterday, we spent the majority of our time in the Coliseum and the Roman Forum.  We didn’t end up getting in a tour group, so we pretty much just looked around at our leisure.  We didn’t learn as much as we would have with a guide, but with the heat, we really just wanted to be on our own time table.  The entire Ancient Roman complex was really cool.  After spending time in Egypt, being able to compare the different monuments that were built during the same time frames is really cool and eye opening.  It’s kind of strange to think about what was going on in different parts of the world at the exact same time.  For example, at the same time that the Coliseum was being built, so were some of the pyramids and tombs in Egypt along with the Temple of Zeus/Parthenon in Greece.

Here are quite a few pictures from the Coliseum and the Roman Forum.

We also spent a decent amount of time walking around the city.  We found our way to the Pantheon which was really cool.  we didn’t realize the Raphael was buried here, but that was super interesting to Hayden since he has a Ninja Turtle named after him!  lol

We managed to find some outstanding pizza for lunch and ice cream for dessert (of course!).  I think that Hayden is going to move to Italy when he is older since his entire diet has consisted of pizza and ice cream for most of the country!  lol  We also found a really cute shop that was sort of like a Pinocchio type of store with all hand made wooden stuff.  Hayden got to pose as Pinocchio.

With plenty of ice cream flowing through our veins, we kept walking for a while longer to see some more of the monuments along with a few fountains.  I have to say, the biggest disappointment was Trevi fountain…it was closed for repair and totally blocked by walls (they were windows, but very dirty so I couldn’t even get a good picture).  I know it’s cheesy, but I wanted to throw money in the fountain!  One of the coolest things about the city is that there are tons of public water fountains all over the place and they are really cool!  One of them was a huge fountain with a ship and you can just fill up your water bottles.  For cheap skates like us, this is fantastic.  🙂

Our last stop of the day was to the Spanish Steps which were also kind of underwhelming.  The massive advertising on the top of the steps didn’t really do anything for me, so we were less than impressed.

We came back to our camp a little early and spent some time cooling off in the pool.  It’s just about dinner time now, so we’re going to head across the street to the grocery store to grab some food.  Tomorrow morning we are going to catch a train for Pisa to see the leaning tower and I think that we will go straight to Florence tomorrow night instead of staying in Pisa.