Sunday, October 24

Here’s a photo of Stromboli fuming away. The Captain sailed slowly almost all the way around, then spun (again slowly) the ship in a circle so everyone had a great view.

On to Civitavecchia, arriving very early in the morning so that several thousand pieces of luggage could be off-loaded before the passengers went ashore. Again only about 100 people were staying aboard for the next cruise. They’ve made changes to their debarkation procedure. No more waiting in the public lounges until your baggage tag color/number is called. Now they give you a letter that tells you what time to go ashore, you wait in your own cabin and when the time comes, you just go. As the cruise director said, “We figured out that if you tell people when to go, they’ll go by themselves...who knew?” By the time we got off, ours was the only luggage left in our color group...easy, easy process. And since we weren’t going through customs in Italy, we just went out an climbed on a bus to our Rome hotel.

At the hotel, the Holland America agent quickly arranged three van tours for the afternoon. Jill  and I had lunch on the hotel’s patio then set out with a group at 2:30 p.m. Our guide was Maximo, and he drove us back and forth all over the central section of Rome for three hours. I won’t list all the places here, but we drove past and/or stopped at just about all the biggie sights to be seen. This photo is your basic overview...just like our tour.

My main impression of Rome (which I did not have from my first visit back in 1962) was of how impossibly narrow and maze-like the streets are. We would be zipping (or crawling through pedestrians) along a street, and looking ahead, all I could see was space closed off by buildings on all sides. Then we would reach what looked like a dead end, and a little road would appear going off an some impossible angle between the buildings that had looked completely solid a minute before. Thank heavens I didn’t need to navigate that city by myself!

We had talked about going to a nearby restaurant for dinner, but by the time we got back to the hotel, we opted to eat there again. After all, it was real Italian pasta regardless of whether it was at the hotel or some restaurant!

Monday, October 25

Up at the crack of dawn again...partly because we had to leave the hotel at 7:15 a.m. and partly because I set the alarm clock wrong.  Off to the airport, then a long uneventful flight back to Washington, D.C. Jill went on to Denver and home, while I spent the night there near Dulles and then next day flew to Houston for a week.

And that’s all for this trip, folks. See ya next time (maybe for Norwegian fjords in April...).