I am now by myself in Europe. Matt and Lyle left last Thursday morning. I haven’t had regular wifi, so this post is a little overdue.
From Rome, I caught a train to the tiny Italian town called Manarola along the northwestern coast. Manarola is in a string of five small towns that make up Cinque Terre. I spent three nights and two days here.
It’s official; I’ve been in Europe for one month now. It doesn’t feel like that long, but looking back through all of the blog posts it does seem like quite some time.
Today was definitely a highlight of the summer. We spent all day at the Vatican.
We started our day today with a visit to the Colosseum. Since we had bought the Roma Pass, we were allowed to skip the 1.5 hour wait and get in very quickly.
We met Lyle’s friend, Jessica, at the Venice train station. From there, we headed south to Florence, Italy. After some slight problems checking into the B&B we started exploring the city.
Today was a very busy day. We arrived in Venice from the night train at ~9am. After checking into the hostel, we started exploring the island. Our first stop was St. Mark’s Square.
Today we checked out of our hotel and made our way back to Versailles. With the Paris Museum Pass in hand and the week day crowd there was a considerably shorter line this time.
Matt arrived in Paris today. After meeting up with him at the hotel, we started our tour of the city. First stop on the list was Versailles. However, the line was absurdly long so we decided to come back for the full experience on Tuesday.
I haven’t updated the blog in a while. This isn’t because of lack of wifi, but rather we have been very busy in Paris. We’re leaving Paris tonight for Venice, so here it goes from the beginning.
From Amsterdam, Lyle and I had train troubles. A lot of train troubles. The high speed train we were supposed to be on was overbooked or something so we had to catch another train to Antwerp to switch. We missed that train so we waited an hour at the Amsterdam train station before finally leaving for Antwerp. From there, we took a train to Lille-Flanders station (south Belgium) and finally a high speed train to Paris Nord station. There it goes downhill.
Our hotel is on the SW corner of Paris and Paris Nord is NE corner. We decide to take the underground metro to our hotel. The people at the visitor center don’t speak English so they write down a list of stops and changes we need to take. We end up getting on the wrong subway a couple times and end up on the East side of Paris. 17 stops and 4 changes later, we arrived close enough to our hotel to abandon the subway and walk. There is a slight language barrier here that makes it difficult sometimes.
Enough complaining; here’s a picture.
Our hotel is very near the Eiffel tower and just looking out the window it feels like we’re in Paris.