Craig's blog

We woke up at 8:00 this morning after a much needed good night’s sleep.  We quickly ate the rest of our cereal, packed our bags and headed off to walk to the Le Domus Romane at the Palazzo Valentini museum.  It’s a museum of old Roman ruins under a 17^th century building that have been excavated and then brought to life with narration and projectors that show what the building would have looked like 2000 years ago.  It did a great job of connecting the ruins to pictures of Roman buildings we’ve seen in the past and again helped us marvel at how well the Romans lived.

Next we walked back to Piazza Campo de Fiori and went to a restaurant that Katie had seen last night to have lunch.  It was one of the best meals we’ve had with excellent focaccia bread, great salads and great service.  We sat inside in an air conditioned room as it is getting pretty warm in Rome today.

We then bought some fruit at the open air market, walked back to our apartment to get our bags and then took to taxis to the Rome train station (which is absolutely huge and amazingly disorganized and not air-conditioned.  After some confusion, we bought our tickets to Arezzo but still had trouble figuring out what track the train was leaving from (although we had an hour so we weren’t too worried).  Jim and I went to scope it out while the girls got some gelato.  We figured out how things worked and that we would probably be on track 1.  However, the actual announcement of which track our train would leave on didn’t come until 2:45 (for our 2:58 departure).  It was track 1, but it was track 1ES, which we found was a long walk in the sun past track 1 to two old tracks further away (1ES and 2ES).  The trains looked much older too.  We walked very quickly with our heavy bags and walked along the train until almost the end where the first class cars are located (which we chose because Jim thought they were more likely to have A/C).  We hustled on and found seats for all of us.  We realized very quickly that there was no A/C in the car and it was probably 100 degrees in the car.  After the train got going we checked the cars on either side of us and found that they were both air conditioned – only ours was not.  After about ½ an hour of baking we moved to another car – me moving each bag one by one.  It was much cooler in the next car – probably 85 degrees.  The train ride was about 3 hours.

When we arrived in Arezzo we took a couple cabs up to our rented apartment.  It is about a mile walk, but it’s up a steep hill.  This is our second airbnb rental (the previous place in Rome was too) and both of them have been excellent, which matches what we’ve heard from many friends.  They’re clean and well-maintained and the people that own them are eager to help.  Impressive.

After we settled in and took showers, we met our fourth daughter, Maddie, and her dad, Doug who are joining us for the rest of the trip.  Our girls were thrilled to have Maddie along again.  Vacationing without Maddie just isn't the same.  :)

We walked to a restaurant and had a great meal with great service.  For example, they didn’t have salads on the menu, but they made salads for 5 of us.  They seemed very eager to please.