Made in Italy

Ok, we didn't have to pay Guido, but it felt like a hit!  

Our journey From Nice to Rome was quite eventful.  We had reservations from a town in Italy to Rome, but we needed to get there by 6:33.  Problem is we got up at 4:07 to get to the station and catch the 5:23 train.   It was pouring rain, the dude with the van was there (ironically, remember the service ?).   We arrived at the train station around 4:55 and it was closed!  This was that moment in life where you go (holy shit, we have no plan....)

The good news is they opened the station 10 minutes later, the bad news is the train we needed wasn't leaving until  1 hour later, which means we'd miss our train to Rome!  I got in line for the reservations at 5:40 and waited until the workers finally opened at around 6:15 (they are supposed to open at 6, but ya know..). We were able to get the first leg of the reservations from these yahoos and had to hope for the best at the next town.  Once we arrived in Vatiligimo Italy, we stood in line again to see if we could make it to Rome.  Luckily they had a reservation we could get to Pisa, and theory was another train 45 minutes later to Rome.  Long story, but we finally arrived in Rome around 8pm.  

Bad news was I had booked a hotel that was 30 miles south of Rome.  Hey, so far the travel planning had gone pretty well (but the travel agent screwed this one up).  It was Sunday night, we had no idea how to get to the hotel, no cell phone, and limited buses (as we found out).  We were greeted by a cab driver (pure Italian), and he said it would 100-120 euros!  We hesitated for a couple seconds, and decided what choice do we have.  Well it turned out to be one of the best 100 I've ever spent.  This guy (we'll call him Luigi) was awesome.  He called his wife on his way and told her he had gotten the parmesan and the 9 euro tuna!  He told us about his 3 grandkids and his trip to Vegas.  It was all very genuine and made us feel more at ease after an all day trip.

We arrived at the G hotel which lived up to it's hotels.com rating (4.2), with it's modern rooms, crazy steam shower and excellent dinner.  

Random thoughts:

1) Note to self, check on transportation if the hotel is more than 5 miles away.
2) Italians are really nice.
3) Now I know what it feels like to bleed money.