Welcome to Rome. It's almost impossible to describe all the different intricacies of Rome but we'll give it a try. We arrived in Rome by train from Venice around 7:00pm. It was raining when we arrived and this was probably one of the more frustrating days we had to deal with. We had directions to our hotel saying take bus #40 and then #86. It took us about an hour to find bus #40 then we were told we were on the wrong bus. Luckily we found someone on the bus (Father Steve Martin) who lead us in the right direction. To make a long story short we finally figured out the bus thing and made it to our hotel (Roma B&B) which looked really cute from the outside, however we were a little disappointed with our room. Our first dining experience in Rome was very interesting. John headed out to find us some food and ended up at a little pizza place where no one spoke English at all. The prices seemed so cheap John figured he was ordering 2 slices of pizza when he was actually ordered 2 very large pizzas. The total for 2 beers and 2 large pizzas was around $10. He brought the pizza back to our room and we opened the box and found a sunny side up egg right in the middle of the pizza. We ate the other pizza instead. Moral of this story, don't order food without your menu translator.

We spent our first day at Vatican City. St. Peter's is the heart of Vatican City and is where we started our day. There is so much to see it's almost pain to the eyes. We spent time walking around and admiring the art, sculpture, tile work and we even ventured underground to see the tombs of the popes. The steps leading to the top of St. Peter's dome is well worth the walk (or lift ride). Once at the top you get a view of the entire city and it is breathtaking. After our jaunt around St. Peter's we headed for the Vatican museum which contains 1400 rooms of art, sculpture, tapistries, and relics. We cut to the chase and headed right for the Sistine Chapel which takes you through about 100 rooms in the museum. Once in the Sistine Chapel they demand silence and no picture or video taking so you'll have to trust us when we say it is completely amazing to see in person. No picture would even do it justice. After the museum we headed out for some lunch and found a great Roman wine bar (suggested by Wine Spectator) called Cul de Sac. The service was very warm and inviting and we had a wonderful lunch. After a bottle of wine, pheasant pate, formaggi, greek salad and lasagne we head to Piazza Navona and then to Trevi Fountain. Trevi Fountain was one of our favorite stops.

The next day we headed to the Palatine Hill and Colosseum area. We spent plenty of time admiring the ruins, the Colosseum and Roman Bath House. It's really pretty amazing to see all the old sites and imagine what life was like way back then. We found it kind of barbaric to hear about the events that happened at the Colosseum, but nonetheless very interesting. We spent a lot of time on foot enjoying all that Rome has to offer.

One of the highlights of our trip, according to John, was our day of golf. Some might find it crazy but we made the effort to find a golf course, figure out how to get there and spent the day on the course. We golfed at the Sheraton Golf Resort and had a great time. The course was nice and we couldn't have had better weather. John had a hard time trying to figure out his distances since everything was in meters, but he still managed to shoot a 79.

We really enjoyed Rome. There is so much to do and so many sites to see, you will never be bored.