Rome to Sant'Agata

When we got up on Saturday morning, we didn't know that we were all signed up to participate in several events of the Travel Olympics that day. Since we didn't know about the Travel Olympics (TO), we foolishly went about enjoying our morning rather than cracking down and getting mentally and physically prepared for the day's upcoming challenges. We had three different choices of activity for the morning, with a rendezvous at the hotel to leave us enough time to make our train. Activity #1 was the Capitoline Museums, Activity #2 was going back to the Vatican to mail postcards and find the bar with the view over St. Peter's, and Activity #3 was shopping. Brian, his parents, and I chose Activity #1, so that's all I can really report on. The Capitoline Museums are two museums that lie at the end of the Forum across the Piazza del Campidolglio. There are many impressive works of art at the museums, mostly sculptures, including the original bronze sculpture of Remus and Romulus suckling on the wolf. Inside the main entrance to the museum on the left side is the first-century statue of Oceanus:

While we were there, there was a temporary exhibit of M.C. Escher's work which was a wonderful treat. He lived in Rome for several years, which none of us knew. While there, he did many etchings of the city's famous landmarks at night, using a flashlight to do his sketches. They were very modern, unique views of sites we'd seen in the past few days. In addition, there were numerous excellent examples of the geometric tessellations for which Escher is famous. The museum itself is on a hill, and you can go up to the roof and look out over the city for quite a nice view.

After we left the museum, the first event of the Olympics began. It was called "Roman Bus Riding." We needed to find the correct stop among the myriad stops that were arranged with no apparent master plan around this huge square, figure out how to buy a ticket, identify the correct bus, hope that we were getting on in the right direction, and then pray that there would be enough room for us to squeeze on board. Miraculously, we accomplished all this! Next stop was the grocery store, where we bought supplies for our picnic lunch on the train.

The second T.O. event of the day was "Luggage Wrestling." The object was to get all 50 million of our bags from the tiny hotel room they were in on the fourth floor down to the lobby with the aid of only a miniscule elevator. We did ultimately succeed, but the judges took some points off because we accidentally sent an elevator full of bags, with no people in it, to the top floor instead of lobby before it finally descended.

The third T.O. event was "Boarding an Italian Train." This one sounds deceptively easy. The first tricky part is that trains in Italy are sometimes delayed, unlike trains in Switzerland, where Swiss people might have a coronary if they were delayed even two minutes. Our train was in fact, a half-hour late. Once our gate came up on the board, we sprinted to make it and board. Then, we had to find and locate our large unruly group in our preassigned seats. But first, we had to stow our luggage in the not so big overhead storage bins, which required the assistance of Cody, my cousin, who builds houses in his spare time.

Once we arrived at the Napoli Garribaldi train station, the next T.O. event presented itself: "Finding the Naples Airport Bus"...how to get to the airport for our rendezvous with our rental cars and my parents and grandfather? First, we tried to take the metro, but it seems that the map of the metro system we consulted before the trip included a line that hasn't been built yet because it's behind schedule in typical Italian fashion. So, we finally found the bus that connected the station and the airport. Once at the airport, we walked inside, walked up the rental counter, and immediately recognized some people we knew!! We got our four cars with no problem.

It was now time for the ultimate T.O. event...the grand finale of the day: "Navigating from Naples to Sant'Agata". Armed with the minimum of directions and some maps, we set out as a caravan. Somehow, we missed the freeway turn-off we needed immediately after the airport and had to do some fancy maneuvering to turn around. Soon, we were on the A-3 headed south to Salerno. Our directions told us to turn off in Castella di Mare and look for a coast road...not too helpful. We turned off and found our little caravan mired in traffic. We all four got split up and suddenly it was each car for themselves! We were panicking a little in our Volvo S70, to be honest. The pressure was getting to Suzy and she was hitting the bottle. Brian, our driver, was fairly calm and cool.

Then I, the navigator, bumped a button with my knee and a navigation system popped up out of the dash. I couldn't get it to work properly, but Leo finally did. First, it led us to a dock because it thought we wanted to take a ferry! We turned off that option in the preferences menu and then were on our way without a hitch. The blue Volvo team was the first to arrive in Sant'Agata. The other cars, without navigation systems, weren't so lucky/. Finally, however, everyone finally made it!!! We had a late dinner and lots of wine!