When in Rome...

For the first time since arriving in Luxembourg, I ventured out on a weekend excursion via the miracle of air travel – and more specifically, via RyanAir. If you’ve never heard of RyanAir, it is one of a few “budget” airlines in Europe, which offers extremely cheap airfare (as little as EUR0.01 for a ticket - excluding taxes and fees, of course).

I had been looking for a cheap flight to an interesting location for a few weeks and I finally settled on a ticket to Rome. It had been six years since my first (and last) trip to Rome and the thought of some good Italian food, wine and gelato made my mouth water. I also thought it might be (at least a little bit) warmer there to provide a respite from the brutal Luxembourg winter.

I only booked the flight six days in advance and the final cost was less than EUR90, including a “web check-in” fee and an “administration fee” (for paying by credit card), but excluding the checked baggage fee. Not bad, but there’s a catch (or two). First, RyanAir doesn’t fly out of the Luxembourg airport. Instead, I would have to travel to Frankfurt-Hahn airport, which, according to Google Maps, is about ninety minutes drive from Luxembourg. Second, there is little or no choice on flight times and those to Rome are not exactly ideal. My outgoing flight was scheduled to depart at 7:20am on Saturday morning and my incoming flight was scheduled to arrive at 11:55pm on Sunday night. If you do the math, you can immediately see the problem. I would maximize my time in Rome while conserving vacation days at work and I would only have to spend a single night in a hotel, but I would pay dearly for it in precious hours of sleep on both Friday and Sunday nights.

At around 8pm on Friday, a few co-workers convinced me that it made more sense to take a bus to/from Frankfurt-Hahn rather than driving. This way, I could try to get some additional shut-eye and not worry about driving, parking, etc. in the middle of the night. I also pre-booked a round-trip bus ticket between Rome-Ciampino airport and Central Rome as I learned there was no train from that airport (as is apparently in the case at most, if not all, of the airports into which RyanAir flies).

In typical fashion, I had procrastinated on laundry/packing, so I was only able to squeeze in a couple hours of sleep (on the couch, no less, so I would be sure to wake up) before heading to the bus stop to catch the 4:05am bus. My plan worked out pretty well as I quickly fell asleep on the bus and didn’t wake up until the bus was pulling up to the airport. Well, pulling into the bus stop, anyway, which seemed to be a half-mile from the terminal. After checking in, going through security, waiting, reading, standing in line, waiting some more, worrying whether my carry-on was under the 10kg limit (they were actually using a scale to weigh carry-on bags before you were allowed to board), and waiting some more, I was finally sitting on the plane ready for take-off and another nap. And yes, my bag made it under the weight limit (at 9.4kg), but I had been nervous enough to move a few items into my coat pockets just in case.

The bus ride from the airport to Central Rome took about 30-45 minutes and I was lucky enough to catch the bus that was leaving shortly after we landed rather than waiting an hour for the next scheduled bus that I actually booked. It must have been around 9:45am when the bus arrived at the main train station in Rome and I set out to find my hotel.

Having been to Rome before, and after spending a lot of time looking at the booking.com map to find a hotel, I had at least a vague idea of which direction to go to from the train station. But I had also brought along my TomTom GPS, so I fired it up, selected my hotel, and started walking in what I thought was the general direction of the Spanish Steps. After at least five minutes, I realized that my GPS was trying to map a route to my hotel from Luxembourg and, for whatever reason, the 42-country TomTom couldn’t pick up a satellite signal in the capital of Italy. So I had no directions and no map, and I was quickly realizing that, while I knew, in theory, which direction I should be walking, I didn’t really know where the heck I was going (I really miss having Google Maps on my Blackberry). And I was carrying a 9.4kg (~20lb) duffel bag over my shoulder, which seemed to get heavier by the minute. I stumbled upon a Metro station and went down into the tunnels to see where I was on the big wall map. It appeared that I was pretty close to where I needed to be, but when I emerged from the underground, I was a bit disoriented and still wasn’t exactly sure where I was going. I set off in one direction, but quickly started to doubt myself and decided it would be a good idea to buy a map from the nearby street vendor. Three Euro later (and after the vendor showed me where we were on the map), I turned around and started walking back in the direction from which I had come. But I had actually been pretty close and I quickly found the hotel.

After all that work to find the hotel, when I finally arrived, I was informed that there was a problem with my reservation (the one I had made fewer then 12hrs earlier), and the hotel was completely booked. But to honor my reservation, my 3-star hotel had reserved a room for me at a (relatively nearby) 4-star hotel (Domus Romana); they would pay for the difference in room price and for a taxi to get me there. In the end, it was a pretty good deal, although Domus Romana wasn’t in quite the same area of town in which I had hoped to stay. I just wished I had known before wandering around the city as Domus Romana was a little closer to the train station and would have been much easier to find.

Not surprisingly, my room wasn’t available when I arrived around 10:45am, but I was able to drop off my bag and head back out to find something to eat. I was told it would only take 45 minutes for my room to be ready, so I walked down the street and found a nice café where I could sit outside and enjoy the sun, along with a cappuccino and a panini, before heading back to settle into my room. I needed to rest for a few minutes and decide on a plan of action for an afternoon of sightseeing. My room was on the 4^th floor and there was a beautiful terrace that I could access from my balcony, so I grabbed my Kindle and spent a few minutes reading and soaking up the sun. It was probably only 60 degrees outside, but it felt fantastic compared to the miserable 30-degree (and cloudy) weather of Luxembourg.

I decided that my first stop in the afternoon would be the Coliseum and the Forum. I also knew that I wanted to take a guided tour, so the first person that solicited me for an “English-language” tour of the Coliseum had an easy sell. This particular group charged EUR22 (10 of which pays for the entrance fee) for the Coliseum tour, but the small yellow sticker they marked me with also gave me access to a “free” tour of Palentine Hill and the Forum. The timing was a bit off, however, as we finished the Coliseum tour at 1:50pm and were told that we could meet for the Forum tour at either 2pm or 3:15pm. The Coliseum tour only included the ground level area of the stadium, so I opted to hang out in the Coliseum for the next hour, walking around the upper level and taking a bunch of pictures.

Truth be told, our guide for the Coliseum tour was mediocre at best. However, the Canadian guy that led us up Palentine Hill and over to the Forum was awesome. It was obvious that he had a real passion for history and he did a great job of explaining the things we were seeing and sharing some of the interesting back-story of Rome. At the end of the tour, he told us that he would also be leading a 2-hour walking tour through the city that evening (starting an hour later, actually), with stops at some of the other famous landmarks of Rome. I was immediately sold and so spent the next hour walking quickly around the parts of Palentine Hill and the Forum that he hadn’t shown us and taking a bunch more pictures.

It was a small group of us who showed up to take the walking tour. There was a father/daughter from the South of France and The Netherlands, respectively, a young boyfriend/girlfriend from Spain and France (Strasbourg), respectively (but currently living in Berlin), and myself. We met and started the tour at the Vittorio Emanuele II monument and went on to see the Traiano Column, 2 churches (including the smallest cathedral in Rome), Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon before ending the 2 hour stroll at Piazza Navona. Once again, our guide proved to be very knowledgeable and the tour was well worth the EUR20 he charged. He also provided suggestions for a restaurant and a bar that were a bit off the beaten path.

It was just past 7pm when we finished so I made plans to meet the young couple at the suggested restaurant at 8pm and I joined the father/daughter and our tour guide at the bar for some beer and conversation. Eight o’clock turned out to be a bit too late to meet back at the restaurant, as it was already completely full. After a long wait without much hope of getting a table, we finally gave up and settled on another restaurant around the corner. The food and wine were good (though not quite as good as I had remembered and expected), but the dessert (tiramisu) was excellent and I enjoyed the company. I was even bold enough to try out some of my limited French (assisted by couple glasses of wine) with my new friends. After dinner, we walked over to Campo de Fiori for a little nightlife. We were all pretty well spent from all the walking we had done and agreed to call it a night after just one drink. I might have tried to stay out a little longer, but it was already pretty late and I had big plans for the next morning – that being a 2-hour run.

For a little background, I have been attending a coached run practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays since mid-January. It is sponsored by PwC and is technically offered to train people for the Luxembourg marathon on May 15. That being said, it is open to all employees whether they are participating in the marathon or not. And, while there are a handful of folks who will run the ½ marathon, there was only one person attending the training program who was actually signed up for the full marathon. That is, until this one person convinced me to sign up, too. I can’t blame him entirely, though; I had been thinking about signing up for the Luxembourg marathon (or another marathon around the same time in a different city) for a while and he just pushed me over the edge. I couldn’t let him train by himself, right?

So I signed up in mid-February and was told I needed to run for 2 hours during each of the last two weekends in February. From there, the training would intensify and we would have a separate workout from the rest of the crowd during the week and then have increasingly longer runs assigned for the weekends. Which brings me back to Sunday, February 28, and my 2-hour run through the streets of Rome.

I didn’t have a specific turn-by-turn route planned when I left the hotel, but I knewn generally that I would try to run past all the sights I had seen Saturday, continue on to a few others I hadn’t seen and spend any additional time, if necessary, running through one of the larger parks in the city. I took a map with me in a plastic baggy just in case I got lost and headed out the door. Talk about efficient sight-seeing…I was able to see the following things in just over 2 hours:

Vittorio Emanuele II monument, the Forum, Coliseum, Circus Maximus (I ran a lap in what remains of the stadium where over 300,000 Romans would watch chariot races), Via del Corso (main shopping street), Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Campo de Fiori, the Tiber river, the Vatican/Piazza San Pietro, Castel Sant’ Angelo, Piazza del Popolo, Villa Borghese and Piazza di Spagna/Spanish Steps (I ran up the steps once and down twice).

To find out how far I had run, I mapped out my route on mapymyrun.com:

The rest of the day was spent walking around the city again, soaking up at much as I could and taking pictures of a few of the places I had been, but while it was dark (during the evening walking tour) or when I was running without my camera. I ate lunch at the recommended restaurant we had given up on the previous evening, drank a cappuccino at a café in Piazza Navona, ate gelato on the steps in front of Trevi Fountain, and enjoyed a glass of wine at a bar near Piazza di Spagna/Spanish Steps.

All too quickly, my time in Rome was coming to an end and I had to head back to the train station (via Domus Romana to pick up my bag) to catch my bus to the airport. And with the bus leaving at 7:40pm, I unfortunately didn’t have time to sit down for another nice Italian dinner.

It was another long journey home via bus/plane/bus, but I slept almost the entire flight to Frankfurt and then most of the bus ride back to Luxembourg. I was terribly paranoid that I would sleep through my bus stop and end up either on the wrong side of Luxembourg City or in France (I’m not sure how far the bus was actually going, but I knew my stop was not the last one), but I woke up just as we were exiting toward the park & ride where I had left my car. Just a few minutes later, and I was back home ready to get into bed as quickly as I could. It was 3am and I already knew it was going to be a rough Monday at work.