Our Sweltering 7 Days in Italy in a Nutshell

Why the nutshell? I don’t know. Basically, this is a little overview of my trip, and then you can bet I will type out a whole series about each individual place. It was a sweltering week in Italy. Most places were not air conditioned. And I am going to tell you all about it.

Days one and seven were traveling days, so this is very quickly going to look more like five days in Italy, I think.

As I mentioned on Facebook, we did fly military space available. Our tickets to Italy, believe it or not, were only $22 a piece. Crazy, huh? Our tickets home were $40/piece.

I promise I am going to write out a little guide on how to fly military space available. My husband even made a video with me about military flights while we were beginning our trip. I need to finish it off, and then I will post it here for everyone who is interested.

First, I want to say that this trip was to celebrate our wedding anniversary, and it was a beautiful vacation.

Alan especially loved touring Italy. We saw so many historical sites and a couple of volcanoes, so this was right up Alan’s alley.

The version of Italy we saw was dictated by our military arrival and departure destinations. That is why we stuck to Rome, Naples, and Sicily.

We both enjoy historical sites, so I am a little embarrassed to admit that while we were in the southern area with all the beautiful water and island destinations in a heat wave, we did not visit the beach.

It is okay though. We did visit the Mediterranean Sea when we were in Israel. Plus, we knew we would have some beach days when we got back to the U.S.

I think the phrase I said the most during our trip was, “planes, trains, and automobiles.”

Did you ever see that movie? It felt like we spent a bulk amount of this trip on planes, trains, and automobiles. Oh yeah, and also buses. Don’t worry though. Nothing caught fire, and no one had to sell shower curtain rings.

Please note the photo above. At the beginning of Day one of flying to Italy, we looked tidy and well groomed. Then we waited all day for our plane to leave. Then it took us around eleven hours of flying, plus many time zones to pass through.

So by the next photo, it was technically day two, though we had not been to a hotel yet or changed clothes or showered. We were riding this 140mph speed train to Rome that I was nervous about. That is why I looked like THIS on the train:

Embarrassing. I do hope I combed my hair before I got off the train, but I doubt that I did. Thankfully, we did ride straight to our hotel and freshen up. Oh, and you would never know that train was going so fast. I could not tell. It was not bad at all.

A lot of this vacation revolved around planes, trains, buses, and automobiles though.

The day we planned to ride the train from Rome to Napoli, our cab driver informed us that there was a national train worker strike. (So glad he told us!!) The strike was scheduled to last all day long, so all buses were booked up. (In Italy, they schedule their strikes.) However, since it was about 40 degrees Celsius/104 degrees Fahrenheit, the government stepped in and ended the strike in the late afternoon.

Our solution was simply to stay an extra day in Rome to wait out the strike. That ended up being my favorite day in Italy.

Then on the day that we planned to fly from Napoli to Catania (way down in Sicily), there was an airline worker strike!

You cannot make this stuff up, so we got the LAST two train tickets that day from Napoli to Catania.

By the way, it was an eight hour train ride. Also, our seats were not together.

The cool thing about the train ride though is that the TRAIN takes the ferry between the mainland boot and the island of Sicily. During the ferry ride, we had to switch trains. Then we were able to get out and look out over the water on the ferry!

That was a one of a kind experience for sure.

Overall, we did this whole week-long anniversary trip to Italy for only $2,138. Can you believe that? And we did not slum it. We stayed in what I would consider nice hotels (often Navy lodges) and paid for many cab rides and restaurant meals.

So what did we actually DO in Italy?

Well, besides studying train schedules and surviving the insane heat wave, we mostly saw Rome and Pompeii and rode trains.

We ended up spending three days in Rome. In Rome, we saw the sites we had heard about the most:

-the Colosseum

-The Titus Arch

-some other archway

-a basilica designed by Michelangelo

– the Vatican Museum

-the Sistine Chapel

-Italian restaurants

-the Trevi fountain

-the Spanish steps

-graffiti in all of the non-historic areas

-all sorts of beautiful buildings that I could not name

-bus stations

-train stations

-the best dressed population I have ever seen…Italian women do NOT dress as we do when out touring the city.

I look forward to writing a whole post on the Rome days and another post about our Pompeii day.

It was so hot in Pompeii that when I think about Pompeii, all I can think about is, “Man, that place was so hot. I almost passed out that day.”

Fortunately, I’m not prone to fainting. If you are, do not visit Pompeii in a heat wave. Pack water, and wear a big hat.

Overall, our Italy trip was a little stressful (for me) and exhausting (surely for both of us) and oh-so-crowded everywhere. I kept reminding myself to be grateful though.

I knew this was a luxury and a very kind thing that Alan was doing for us, and I did think it was cool to visit so many famous places.

Crowding into train after train, standing room only, and wondering why nowhere was air-conditioned is not how I envision a relaxing vacation. There was very little relaxing involved in this trip.

When I am crowded into a D.C. train I do not feel this stressed even though it is the same. In a foreign country where I did not know the language, I just felt far out of my comfort zone.

But mostly, the problem was the heat.

At some point in Rome day three, I sat down on my hotel bed and said, “I am not going anywhere else today. I do not even want dinner. All I want to do is lie here, sleep, and let the swelling in my ankles go back down.” And that is exactly what I did.

Y’all, I was never good at extreme heat! Two different years back in high school I called my band director trying to quit because I could not take the endless days of one hundred degree sun in band camp. Somehow he always managed to talk me out of quitting. The sun and I are not friends.

Alan, on the other hand, absolutely loved touring Italy and enjoyed the freedom of not being with a tour group.

He was downright exuberant. “Oooo let’s take a picture here. Let’s take a picture of this,” he said so many times. I was always a little shocked. It was so incredibly hot that I had a hard time caring about what I was seeing or taking photos. Plus, I wished I had my tennis shoes and an ice water, all the time.

There is a good lesson to take from this. Wear tennis shoes. My flip-flops were comfortable, but they strained my legs because it had been a year since I had worn them. My feet are used to tennis shoes.

I will tell you all the details in my next few posts!

For my next vacation, I told Alan I am willing to fly military flights. However, I would like to pick a quiet place on the coast and not change hotels at all.