From Rome to Home

Yesterday we met up with a friend from Switzerland.  We were planning to meet her in Geneva but our intentions weren’t clear and she thought we’d be there at the end of January.  It worked out, though, because she happened to be in Rome on a school trip, so even if only by luck, we were still able to meet up for a few hours to have lunch and explore a little of Rome together.

After she had to leave to meet with the rest of her class, Erin and I went into the Colosseum and then spent the rest of the day wandering the streets of Rome.  Later in the day we went to our hostel and planned out the rest of our trip, only to realize (again) that we’d had many more good intentions than time.  We’ve already cut out Spain, Gibraltar and Morocco and I was hoping to be able to visit Liechtenstein and Austria, but once we began planning out the rest of our trip it didn’t take long to realize that neither country would be possible.

Before we arrived, I thought two weeks would be plenty of time to see and do everything I’d wanted.  I knew it was ambitious but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can…oops, wrong story.  Had we spent less time in Paris, we could’ve had a couple of days to travel elsewhere.  Next time we’ll plan on at least a month, two weeks just isn’t enough time.  The trip is beginning to feel rushed but not in the sense that we’re trying to see too much (after cutting a bunch of things out), just that up until now we’ve only spent one day on a train.

Now, for the next week, our stops are shorter and the train rides more frequent.

I’m not a planner…that’s Erin.  I’m the one who says, “Hey!  Let’s go to Europe.  What should we do?  Eh, let’s figure that out when we get there.”  Since we haven’t had any real itinerary, we didn’t know which city we’d be traveling to before returning to Paris, meaning we couldn’t make train reservations to Paris.  No reservations means we have no way of getting to the airport. Until yesterday, we didn’t even have a plan to get home and the last time we tried making a reservation on short notice, we failed miserably.  But now we know where we’ll be and our tickets back to Paris are booked.

So where will we be?

Tomorrow we leave Rome early in the morning to travel to Pompeii.  We’ll visit during the day and get on the train that afternoon to Florence.  We’ll spend two nights in Florence, one day visiting museums then the next we’ll detour to Pisa to smoke a cigarette (the only thing our friend from the hostel said there was to do in Pisa…and neither of us smoke) and see the Leaning Tower.  From there we’re on a train to Lucerne, Switzerland for a day to visit another friend before continuing on to Zurich for a night.  Our last train will take us from Zurich into Paris where we’ll spend the night before getting on a plane to come back home.

And that’s the plan!  Where has the time gone?  It’s been a good trip thus far and hopefully will continue to be in the coming days!