Arrival in Rome:

Well, we're here. We left Austin on Wednesday at Noon, and flew for 2 1/2 hours to get to Chicago. We had about 2 hours there to eat and visit the duty free store, then the trip across the big water started.

The flight wasn't bad... Cori and I sat together for most of the flight, and we had the whole center of the row (3 seats) to ourselves. For most of it, she was crashed out, and I ended up sleeping for about half the flight too. They served 2 meals... dinner was actually not bad (some sort of beef-ish meat in sauce with mashed potatoes, a salad, and a roll... breakfast was a croissant, yogurt and orange juice), and a couple of movies... I think there were 2 movies, I went to sleep at some point after Alvin and the Chipmunks went off.

Customs and Immigration were fine... nothing to share there.

We were met by 3 people from Becca's work, and we went to her office, after a brief stop at our eventual apartment complex. Looks like a nice area; it's right off of one of the main roads, and the guy I was riding with gave me some tips about getting around the neighborhood.

While we were getting checked in at her office, we had a quick bite to eat in the cafeteria... decent food, reasonable prices. A box had already arrived from a family member back in the states (who will remain nameless, but Thank you!).

We walked down to our hotel and checked in... the hotel is fairly nice, and is conveniently located right around the corner from the Barberini plaza. We're on the fourth floor, and there's an elevator in the hotel... literally the size of the phone booth. The elevator is kinda weird, with separate inside and outside doors. The workings of the elevator open and close the inner doors, but the outer door is manual, and there's an interlock that if you try to open the outer door too soon, the elevator has to go to another floor and return before the outer door will open.

While we were ferrying our luggage up in the elevator, I rode down once with our next door neighbor (in the hotel), Alex Kingston (you'll remember her from the show E.R.... her character was married to Anthony Edwards' character). There are only two rooms per floor (us and her)... I'm thinking of being neighborly and inviting her over for a cappuccino tomorrow morning. Do you think my wife would mind?

Yesterday afternoon we walked to the Spanish Steps, sat down and had gelato. We wandered back and stopped for pizza. Cori didn't want anything to eat, and she put her head down on the table and promptly went to sleep. Palmer, Becca, and I enjoyed the pizza with a bottle of wine (well, no wine for Palmer), then we walked back to the hotel and went to bed.

Hope this is enough for now... undoubtedly, I will remember something that I forgot to include.