Roma

Yet another amazing experience traveling from country to country. We woke up early Monday morning with Italy in our blood. We packed our bags and said good bye to our new friend Colin. We made it down to the main street in La Grave (a 40 minute hike down a mountain) and picked up our last allotment of French bread and quiche for a while. After breakfast we stuck out our thumbs and got picked up by a man who said he would take us to Briancon, the closest "big" city. We enjoyed talking with our lift, and he knew much about the Alps. Apparently he is some kind of avalanche scientist. He was nice enough to drive us right up to the front gate of the train station.

I was able to figure out how to get us to Rome on a bus then train, leaving us four hours free in Briancon. Briancon is a cute mountain town, not very big but big enough. We sat around and made each other laugh to pass the time.

The bus ride was short, only about an hour, and took us to Oulx, Italy. We had our first Italian dinner across from the train station, and it was lovely. Pizza!!! We only had to wait for about an hour until the train left for Torino. We made it there in good time and the next train to Rome was leaving in three minutes. Very quickly I sucked down a cigarette and boarded the night train to Rome. By this time it was around 10 pm and we were getting tired. Planing on sleeping on the train I realized I forgot to ask for a sleeper car, and now we had a room with six seats and everyone was full. Great. Sleeping was damn near impossible. Zoey and I managed to put our feet on each others seat and try to get some rest, but little was achieved.

The train took about eight hours to get to Rome, leaving us there at 6 am. We had a dead blackberry and no internet to use in the train station and no where to go. Once again with our sorry planning skills we didn't book a room. So we did what we could. Wait for sunrise. The train station was really cold that morning for some reason. Lucky for us the blackberry came back on just long enough to get an address we might be able to stay at. Funny how things work out sometime.

We found the hostel in no time. Even better, they had a room and let us check in at 9 am.

We went right to bed and got up late in the afternoon to do some exploring. We found the Coliseum and walked around that, but did not pay to go inside.

The next day we got Zoey some purple Italian leather boots, which she absolutely loves. And spent all day going into second hand shops and walking around.

For some reason Zoey got rather sick with a fever and I didn't feel that well either so we stayed in bed most of the day on our third day. I feel bad when this happens. I got sick and had a fever in Paris on day a couple of weeks ago, so we did nothing that day either. O well. We did at least get out of bed to go check out the fountain here. It is very pretty. The rumor is, if you toss a coin into the fountain, you get to come back. So I tossed in one for me and Mom, and Zoey did the same for her and Marion. Here's hoping. Rome was more than I hoped for and I can't wait to come back!