So everything has officially been booked. I just reserved the last hotel room today at lunchtime. The plan is to stay in Rome from the 13th to the 22nd. We'll be staying at the Sheraton Roma, which is about 6 kilometers south of downtown Rome, just off of the Cristoforo Columbo highway. After eating large quantities of pasta and gelato and seeing the sights, we'll be checking out of the Sheraton on the 22nd and taking a Eurostar train northwest to Turin (aka. Torino). This is the city that hosted the recent winter Olympics, located just a few miles south of the Alps. There is a famous Egyptian museum located here, as well as the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, which houses the Shroud of Turin. We might also take a quick bus trip out to the mountains and take some pictures and video. Depending on how expensive it is, we might even go skiing or snowboarding for a few hours.
We'll spend a couple nights in Turin and then hop another Eurostar train to Venice. We've booked a 70 minute boat tour of the Grand Canal. The hotel we're staying at in Venice is located a few miles away from the main island of Venice at another island called Murano. We'll have to take a boat into Venice each morning.
After checking out on the 26th, we'll hop yet another Eurostar train, this time going to the southern city of Salerno, where we will hop a bus to the Amalfi coast. The Amalfi coast is basically made up of of bunch of hills and cliffs overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea in the Mediterranean. There's a bunch of towns and villages located here, and we'll be staying at the Grand Hotel Tritone, which is built on the side of a cliff near the town of Praiano.
We'll be chillaxing at Praiano for a few days (I'll be renting one of the scooters from the town nearby and scooting around the coastline for a few hours, Darren wants to go snorkeling), and then on the morning of the 29th we'll be checking out, bussing back to Salerno, and then riding the Eurostar train back to Rome, where we'll be stay for a couple more days before catching our flight home. The hotel we've booked for the last few days in Rome is a converted monastery that is located about 400 feet from the Colleseum, so it will be nice and close to the downtown area. I'm hoping that its in decent walking distance from the Trastavere so I can go hang out at the marketplace there and buy food and wine. mmmmmm.
Anyways, that's what the plan is for now. Laterz.
posted by Rustybutt @ 2:50 PM
