November 27, 2019
Day 63 - Lecce - Brindisi - Rome
The Long March - Part 1
We were up early and down for breakfast at 7:30 sharp. In Italy at this time you can be pretty much assured you will be by yourself and we were.
Breakfast done we schlepped our bags downstairs and checked out. Turns out that our airport shuttle has already turned up and we were informed that he had taken our bikes out to the vehicle. Great!
Said our warm goodbyes to Fulvia and then went out to meet the shuttle guy.
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This is what we encountered.
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Ok, this is why we give ourselves lots of time for this sort of stuff. A little lateral thought and a phone call to his buddy for another vehicle and were set. Next stop Brindisi airport.
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The check in at Brindisi was very quick and painless. K forgot a corkscrew in her carry on bag that was 0.5 cm too long and that provided a bit of entertainment at security, but no other drama and we’re sitting here waiting for the flight.
There will likely be lots of downtime like this today that I’ll use to blog away in real time.
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There will most likely be several moments of ‘oh s#%t, what are we going to do about that’ as we negotiate our way around Rome Airport with (hopefully) 2 very large bike cartons. Stay tuned.
Landed in Rome on time. Round 1 victory for team Kaarsoo-Mcleod!
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Next up - a schlepp to terminal 3 from terminal 1 to find the left luggage place. This is always interesting!
Rome airport is remarkably organized and calm. We had a ~400 m walk along a wide flat walkway to terminal 3 and found the left luggage area straight away. The ‘cartons’ just fit through the conveyer gate! We’ll pick these up tomorrow morning and then check in at Air Canada . Round 2 to the good guys!
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Caught the express train (only express in the sense it does not stop ~ 35 min for a 25 km ride - very slow!) into Rome and had a whistle stop tour around the Forum/Senate/Coliseum area. Our good fortune for today sort of ran out, as all access to the actual insides of all these sights closed at 4:30. In true Griswald fashion we got to this area at about 4:15! It wasn’t a real let down though as the sun was just setting and we got some amazing night views of all of the major Roman piles. A couple of hours really does not do this place justice but that’s all we had. Caught an simple and early dinner and then took the train back to Fiumicino.
I’ll upload pictures later .... they are on my real camera. I’m doing all this on my iPhone (very easy too - thanks to the folks at CycleBlaze for making this so simple!). Now we’re off to our B&B that’s a few km’s from the airport. The big flights (first Toronto and then Calgary) are tomorrow morning.
.... back in the B&B and the pics are downloaded off the camera. Here's a very small sample of them from around the Coliseum / Forum area. I won't even try to add captions ... most of the shots are of truly iconic places. Rome truly is one of the places that people should try to visit at least once in their life. It's been 16 years since we've been here (not counting our ride through 3 weeks ago) and it is still breathtaking.
In addition to the stunning Roman ruins we saw & heard a couple of really good buskers. One guy on sax, who we got a picture of, and another guy with a guitar who sounded remarkably like Mark Knopfler (very distinctive playing style).
...and that's a set up for....
Song of the Day, Going Home by Mark Knopfler ...cause that's what we're doing. This was the theme song to the 1983 movie Local Hero. If you haven't seen it you should, and not only for the music!
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