My Trip to France and Italy, Day 10

It's morning, and we're taking down the camp.

And we're checking out of the camp now. It took a while, cause their credit card machine wasn't working.

Here's a last look back at Florence. It really was a beautiful city.

A closer look. Have you noticed that all the buildings are more or less the same color?

And we've reached the car garage (it's across the street from Happy Rent, and underground.

It's blurry, but this sign said the same thing in 4 languages, and I thought that was kinda neat.

And we've got ourselves a car: A shiny blue 4-door Fiat.

So we loaded up the car with our stuff. One of the nice things about cars is that they have 4 wheels, so adding weight to them doesn't suddenly dork up their balance.

We stopped in at a Burger King, (one that sold Doughnuts as well, it was weird). I got a Whopper with Bacon and cheese, and it was heavenly. Once again, they gave me a thinger of mayo, and I looked at it with disgust.

Here's me at Burger King. You can tell I'm pretty jazzed about that burger, can't you?

The next few shots are taken on the drive to Rome. In the distance, you can see a castle.

So we were driving... and there was a city on the hill... and I took a picture of it. This is that picture.

This is pretty much what the first half of the drive looked like, until we got nearer to the coast. Throughout this drive, I'm sitting in the back with Becky, and I'm writing in my journal about the previous few days' events.

So we're driving alaong, and we see these signs that have different speed limits set for different lanes. It was weird.... Anyway, after repeated failed attempts to get a picture of it, I got this video of it. If you pause it, you can see what I'm talking about. Otherwise, you can just pretend you care, and move on to the next picture.

I looked online for quite some time, but I wasn't able to find out what this building is. If anyone knows please let me know.

Here's another shot of that unknown building through the back window of our car.

We're in Rome, and I saw this. It was latin.. so.... click click.

S.P.Q.R. was stamped on everything.. I was jazzed, cause my Latin teacher (magistra) had told us all about it back in the day. It stands for senatus populusque romanus, "The Senate and People of Rome".

Some of the signs in Italy were kinda funny. You could tell what they were trying to say, but they were just worded poorly. Here's one from our hotel, on the door to the little elevator.

We were kinda illegally parked, so I told Maryrose and Mindy that I could carry the bags if they went and moved the car. Becky agreed to give me a hand, so she and I grabbed all the bags, and the Mindy and Maryrose moved the car. Here's me with Mindy and my packs.

Here's Becky and me carrying the packs.

Here we are in our hotel in Rome. Maryrose had dyed her hair red before the trip, and wanted to redo it, so here she is getting prepared.

Here's me, and my bunk bed in the Rome hotel room. Maryrose and I got Ace Bandages at the Pharmacy nearby, and it was quite the adventure explaining to the guy there what exactly we wanted. ("Benda elastico")["Ah! Aquafresh Bandage!"]

And here's me in the hotel.

Here's Mindy checking out the map of Rome.

Here's Maryrose after putting the hair dye stuff on. She seems pleased.

Mindy dyed her hair then as well.

We're in Rome, in the hotel, and this is my foot. It's started to bruise quite nicely, and it was pretty swollen.

We're out to dinner, and our waitress spoke really good English, with no sign of an accent. So I asked her where she was from, and she told us that she had just moved out to Italy from California.

More us out to dinner. We got a good bottle of wine, and had a plate of italian cheeses that was quite good.

Here's a timer picture... That's what we look like when we're not blurry.

After some wine, we started to get sorta artsy.

Here's a clip of the food we got. Becky and I got fish (mine tasted like bacon, it was amazing.), and Maryrose and Mindy got beef. Good stuff.

We stopped off for some ice cream, and they had a Tweety bird gumball machine.

And here's the beard, day 1 in Rome.