Day 3: May 8th

Today we traveled to our next destination, but before that I had to pack….my stuff exploded.  I planned to wake up at 7:45a to finish up packing and have time for breakfast, that didn’t happen. I ended up sleeping till 8:15a. I was frantically packing and poor Danielle (my roomie) was waiting on me after she was all packed and ready to go. Finally I’m ready to go and we have about 10 minutes to run downstairs and stuff our faces. We definitely didn’t get enough food…oops!

We met everyone in the lobby at 10a (late of course). We walked (and a group of us got left behind…) to a Piazza to go on a bus tour to see sights we didn’t see the day before. We saw the Vatican state, Castel Sant’ Angelo, Palazzo di Giustizia, Arco di Costantino (again), the Colosseo (again), the Spanish Steps (again), Monumento a Garibaldi, Faro al Gianicolo, and tons of others. We pretty much saw all of the major tourist attractions, which was nice to actually get to see more. We finished our bus tour and got back to the hotel with about 15 minutes to grab everything and check out then we hopped onto a bus.

When we were out of Rome we stopped for lunch at this truck stop/gas station thingy. It was pretty clean and it was much better than any place that I’ve been to in America. Lunch was ok. I think we should’ve had more time so we could’ve grabbed lunch in Rome. I hate that we have such little time to eat sometimes and that our day is planned from the time we wake to the time we go to bed. How do they expect us to actually write our journal entries? We’re already dealing with a lack of sleep, I guess they want us to stay up even later and write. Anyways….

The bus ride was only about an hour and a half and I slept the entire way. If you put me in the sun I am going to fall asleep. We arrived at a garden, and not just any random garden but this freaking amazing garden! It was the Giardino dei Tarocchi, or The Tarot Card Garden. It was so cool!! It’s a sculpture garden and all of the sculptures are based off of a deck of tarot cards, and these sculptures are just beautiful and amazing and they really “spoke” to me. One of the sculptures the artist, Niki de Saint Phalle, actually lived in. The inside of the sculpture was covered in mirror fragments and it was soooo beautiful! (pictures to come, I promise!). The garden also had a snack bar, which I was quite happy about because by the time we were done at the garden my tummy was declaring it was dinner time.

We clambered back onto the bus after a quick snack (ha! Snack was lasagna). The lasagna was frozen and it’s about 100 times better than the crap at home. All this fresh food is spoiling me! The ride to where we were staying (in Piombio) was about a 2 hour ride, I slept again…We finally got to the resort and had about half an hour to get to our rooms and to dinner. The room seemed brand-spankin new because when you walked in it smelled new. You could smell the wood they used for the stairs.

We had about 30 minutes till dinner so I hopped into the shower. It was so much better than the shower in Rome! Dinner consisted of not 3 courses (normal) but 6 courses. I repeat 6 COURSES!! I had a huge food baby after that, but boy was I happy! After dinner we headed to bed and slept hard.