Rome: Part Two

I must say we got REALLY lucky with the weather in Rome. Coming from chilly England, we were basking in the sun although it was barely 70 degrees. We ventured out towards Piazza Navona passing pretty buildings along vast boulevards. 

Nearby here we had a crazy ATM experience. Robert had withdrawn some money earlier that morning at ag different ATM near our apartment, not enough to take us over our daily limit. Then we tried to get more out after the tour at Deutsche Bank, but the ATM kept giving us a message that it had already given us our daily amount. I will skip ahead to what happened later that night. We had to call our bank, USAA and ask them about why we were having these issues with daily limits. They told us that we had already withdrawn 400 euros or something like that. I heard what Robert repeated over the phone and said to him that we never got that much money today, more like 250 only. And that's when we started the investigation about what was going on. Apparently, although the Deutsche Bank ATM told us we withdrew money, it never actually happened. So USAA went on to remedy the problem and we got our money back. Phew...now I can reread about this experience someday:).

Back to Piazza Navona, the place where people fall in love with Rome. 

Fall in love with Rome and with that special someone by your side. In my case it happened to be Robert.

These crazy world traveling children. 

Robert trying to capture the moment with the fewest amount of tourists in the background and catch Mark without doing his "sumo" pose.

Stalls and stalls of pictures and souvenirs. 

From the piazza we walked through narrow streets to the Pantheon. NOT Parthenon. 

Look up! This building was built in 126 AD! Amazing...

It was not very quiet inside as there were crowds of tourists going in circles of this majestic building. 

The kids did well so I tried to give them a skinny on what the Pantheon was about according to Rick Steves.

It was definitely time for gelato. Oh, it was so good.

After this, as we are so adventurous, we grabbed our kids and said, what the heck, we'll keep walking as everyone was doing great. We knew that the Trevi Fountain was closed, unfortunately, but we had to pass this area anyway on the way to the Spanish Steps. This is the kids' sad face that the fountains were under construction.

Well...little did we know...this was not our last disappointment. We arrived to the Spanish Steps to see them closed off as well!! Loads and loads of people roaming around on the street and sitting around by the steps, but no one ON the steps. How often can you get a picture like that of the Spanish Steps?:)

Well, we were a bit lost in terms of what else to do as it was 4:30 in the afternoon, kind of between dinner and not dinner, you know what I mean... So we walked even further out of the city towards Villa Borghese in hopes to find this beautiful garden with a playground or something. We found some curious things but not really beautiful garden. One side of the park reminded us of an abandoned zoo. The other one had this old hippodrome or something plus bicycle carts for rent. We found a playground though and let the kids play for a bit. 

I was a bit disappointed by not finding anything awesomely Italian here, but Katya and Robert loved it here, sitting and relaxing in the quiet of the October sun.

After this we took the metro to our apartment and bought some dinner to make food in our apartment. It was fabulous! 

You may laugh that spent only one day in Rome AND one day in Vatican back in April, but we felt all right about it. We know what type of travelers we are and how much we prefer wide open spaces to museums:) and we learned not to feel bad about it. 

Good bye, Roma! We may see you again someday.

Lyana.