Review of Insight Tour Vacations, Italian Vogue Tour
Travel Dates: Oct 1st – 12th, 2011
Day 1
I took lots of notes and pictures during my recent trip to Italy, but have put very little on the blog, so I am taking this week to catch up before I forget everything and have to take another trip to remember everything we saw.
We had added a pre-night to the 11 day Italian Vogue tour, to give us a chance to adjust to the time change, so Day 2 we had to the opportunity to explore Rome on our own until 5 p.m. where we were to meet the tour group and director for a welcome cocktail. We had a bit of trouble waking up in the morning after only sleeping 4 hours the day before, so it was 10:30 Rome time before we crawled out of bed. I was rather disappointed in us, as I thought we would be up earlier to get the most out of our time in Rome.
We got dressed and it was too late for the complimentary breakfast, so we walked out of the hotel and asked for directions to the Trevi Fountain. I had seen it before, but it was so crowded and we only had about 15 minutes, so I knew I wanted to go back. The bell hop handed us a map and gave us what should have been easy direction. Just take the main road (Via Nationale,) down until you see “Quatro Fontana,” which is the street of the four fountains. Turn right and walk down about a mile, then make a left and we would eventually find the fountains. With camera in hand we headed out with confidence.
We walked for quite a long time, before taking out the map to see if we had passed the street of the four fountains. As we later realized, we had passed it quite some time ago although I had been carefully looking at every street sign. So we took the first right we could find thinking that we would end up where we needed to be eventually. I should know better because streets in Europe wind a lot, so although you may think you are headed in the right direction, you are slowly curving another way. We ended up turning back to the main road (Via Nationale) since we knew we could get back to the hotel from there, and kept walking when we ran into a sign that said Trevi Fountain…great. Turned right again, (Via del Milano,) but only to see a short distance away a tunnel with cars speeding in and out of it. That could not be the way could it? We moved forward to check it out. Sure enough you walk through the tunnel and there is no railing separating the pedestrians and the cars. As you can see in the picture, there are small sidewalks on either side of the road under the tunnel, but walk alongside of speeding cars?
I wasn’t going to turn back at this point and my husband was quite hungry. I wanted lunch near the Trevi Fountain so if he wanted to eat, we would have to walk through the tunnel. I know he was relieved when we got out. The first thing you see when you come out of the tunnel is a souvenir stand. We took our first left and followed the flow of the crowd to the Trevi Fountain.
We soon arrived…mission accomplished.
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