Italia: Trastevere and Narni

    Ciao a tutti! We're in Italy... unbelievable. This is going to be an amazing trip. Day one and two have been fantastic. Right from the start, we've been amazed by this country. The architecture, the history, the food, the people, the language, the scenery. All of it is so different and wonderful, and we can't get enough of it.

    Granted, our journey to get here was a little tiring, and we may not have fully recovered from it yet. The flight from JFK to Rome was about 8 hrs long, but we definitely spent more than only 8 hrs in the plane. Neither of us got much of any sleep, so, since the flight took off around 8p and landed around 10:30a, we were kind of up all night long with a whole day ahead of us.

    After we landed and picked up our rental car we headed into Rome.

    






    The plan was to park near the Vatican and see the sights around there, but that didn't happen because we really could not find parking. So we headed to Trastevere, Rome. We found parking after some time, used the bathroom, had our first italian meal (pizza and wine, of course), got our cell phones up and running, and went exploring.

  We had to get gelato before we left, and I wanted my first Italian caffe.

    At this point, we were getting ready to head to our hotel. After the flight, all of the walking, and fighting tooth and nail to survive driving in Rome, we were exhausted, and we had a 2.5 hr drive to the hotel. Add to that, it was about 6p, and we wanted to find dinner on the way home.

    We had no idea where to go for dinner. searching on Maps was difficult, so we chose a town near our route to the hotel that seemed to have some main roads going through it. The town is Narni, and we really enjoyed it. It was an old brick town. The roads were essentially sidewalks and we had no idea where we were going, we were just following Maps. At the top of the street, we found a small little piazza with 3 restaurants. We had delicious pasta and wine and tried our best to speak Italian with the people.

    As tired as we were, we wanted to walk around for just a few minutes. We soaked Narni in, headed to the car and drove to the hotel.

    Our hotel is called Relais IL Canalicchio. Its essentially a small castle, it's awesome. You park underneath carports overgrown with vines and are surrounded by olive and cypress trees. In fact, the whole time you're on the long, windy road up the big hill that the hotel sits upon, you're surrounded by olive trees. Of course, I missed the parking lot driving up. So we came in through the front, literally driving between people's rooms. I almost hit a flower pot. We got out of the car, looked up at the Milky Way, and we went to bed.

I drove through this tunnel... my bad.

    One day down. 10 more days like this? Yes, please.