Gettin' to Rome

We kicked off Epic Trip IV on Friday afternoon, meeting at David and Jami’s house in Bloomington.  We hit the road earlier than planned, grabbed some Wendy’s for lunch (same one as Epic Trip II), and headed to Chicago O’Hare Airport. We rolled into the third party parking company right on schedule, dropped off the keys and jumped on the shuttle to Terminal 5.  Upon arrival we were greeted with a massive line to check luggage at LOT Polish Airline.  We stood in line for 20 minutes or so before noticing the separate line for Star Alliance Gold members. We asked the helper monkey that was walking around if my United Gold card would let us skip the line, and it worked like a charm. It pays to be a high roller. With our bags checked we moved on to the huge line for security. No high roller treatment here, we were stuck with the peasants wandering through the cattle corral. Once through security, we were greeted with Terminal 5 which astounded us with its lack of anything useful in the way of food or accommodations.  We tried to use my Gold card to get into one of the lounges, but they said I couldn't bring along the bums I was traveling with. We found some empty chairs and waited as our flight was delayed over an hour and a half. David overheard someone at the gate saying LOT stands for “Late or Tomorrow”. Indeed.

We were starving, since it had been almost 7 hours since Wendy’s.  We were hoping they would serve dinner immediately after leveling off, and shut off the lights so we could sleep soon after. No dice on either front.  Dinner was almost an hour and a half after takeoff, and they didn't switch off the lights for another hour and a half after that, leaving just 6 hours until landing in Warsaw.  I guess they didn't want to make the Poles buy their Duty Free liquor in the dark.  We landed 20 minutes after our connecting flight to Rome was supposed to have left, but it still showed up on the departure board as “Final Boarding”. We made our way through Customs and took our place at the back of the security line, without much hope of making our flight.  Amy decided to flag down one of the LOT personnel and ask if we could jump to the front of the security line.  He agreed and as we walked to the front, it turns out most of the security line was trying to make the same flight as us! Our flight from Chicago must have had half the passengers for the flight to Rome, so they were holding the plane. We got through security and on board, taking off about an hour late.  Once we landed we breezed through picking up luggage and buying train tickets to Rome Termini station, just blocks away from our hotel.  We made it to our hotel a little after 3PM local, running low on sleep, but we had a city to explore.

 We headed out for the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps, stopping along the way at the basilica (church) in the Plaza della Republica.  It looked a little rough on the outside, but the inside was incredible! We wandered around inside, taking pictures for a while before heading on down via Nazionale towards Piazza Venezia (Venice Plaza).  The main fixture of Piazza Venezia is a huge monument to some Italian guy. You can see the angel sculptures on top from nearly anywhere in the city.  We moved on towards Campo di Fiori, but hunger struck again and we headed for the Piazza Navona area for dinner.  We filled up on pizza, pasta, and wine before continuing our trip across the Piazza, stopping in for some gelato at the far end. We were all pretty tired at this point and starting heading back to our hotel for the night, but not without a quick stop at the Trevi Fountain (the Spanish Steps had to wait for the next day). The Trevi Fountain is a huge fountain featuring the Roman god of the sea, Neptune, set into a huge building façade. The crowd was huge, even after 10PM.  We struggled through the uphill hike back to our hotel to catch some Z’s in preparation for another big day.