Day 120: Civitavecchia/Rome

This one is going to be difficult because there was so much to see, and I took so many pictures that just choosing a few won’t convey the grandeur of the place. Jessica had been there four times previously, but not for 20 years. I had never been, so we booked an excursion with the ship that gave us a round trip transfer and a hop on hop off bus ticket. We had tried to book a hop on/off bus in Santiago, but our late arrival in port to Valparaiso, Chile, caused us to miss the bus transfer and our prepaid hop on/off. It was a bit of a bitter pill, and in hindsight was one of our least favorite ports. But I digress. The hop on/off in Rome was fabulous and allowed us to enjoy most of the highlights in a day, albeit from a distance. Our guide told us that there were an additional 400,000 people in Rome because of the Pope’s death. It was pretty crowded and it was on a Sunday, the first Sunday of the month, so many museums were free. I think the coliseum was free but the line to get tickets was so long that we opted to try and see as much as possible.

It’s mind blowing to imagine that this was the home of the Roman Empire all those millennia ago! The hop on/off was great, but the lines got really long and some people were waiting nearly an hour to get back on. It was a 2 hour loop, and we had a time to meet our return bus, so we just stayed on until we were back near our pick-up point. No, you can’t see Rome in a day, and next time we’ll stay 5 days!

Our world cruise ends tomorrow in Genoa, so we had to finish packing up our cabin, where we lived for 4 months. We also had to say goodbye to the wonderful staff and friends we met on this incredible journey!

We had to have our packed bags out in the hall by 10PM and then we had to be out of our cabin by 8:00AM. We did have time to say tearful goodbye to friends, many who were crew.