As you might expect from last night's problem, our train arrived late. But then again, you can always expect your train to arrive late in Italy. I don't know if I could get my high-speed train reservations changed for this, but I just went ahead and bought reservations on the next high-speed train to Rome. We made to Rome around maybe 4pm, and I called the hotel to say we were coming. Unlike Paris, I was prepared with directions, and we found the location without much trouble. The place was pretty dumpy and the inclusive breakfast was laughable, but it was at least safe and quiet.

I had a Rick Steves book covering Rome, and we decided to follow it's evening tour of illuminated sites. The walk was neat, and we found a nice cafe to have dinner at. We ended up at the last stop, the Spanish Steps, a little after midnight. Being that late, the metro was closed, and we had to take a bus back to our hotel. This ended up being much, much, much more difficult than we expected. We ended up walking back to the central station, where multiple ticket machines ate plenty of my money -- we had to give up and travel without a ticket! We had a vague memory of the person at the hotel telling us which bus to take, plus Megan had a business card from the place that had a little map drawn on it showing the nearest cross streets plus a pyramid at the end of the street. We got on the correct bus, but it was difficult to determine the correct stop. Stupid Italians..... the bus had an LED display at the front which could have been used to list the stops (like they do in Germany), but instead it just said the route number. When the bus made a stop, we struggled to read the sign to figure out what stop we were at, but the bus just drove past several of the stops. We saw the pyramid, and decided to get off the bus a little while later. This was the right street, but we figured out that we hadn't gone far enough. So we walked and walked. We asked a police officer for directions, and he pointed us down the street. A ways down the road, we stopped at a hotdog stand for directions, and the pointed us back where we came from. The map seemed to show a street that wasn't there. We finally walked a block further, cut over, and doubled back to find our hotel. I think it was like 2am.... two hours of wandering lost around Rome! Megan and I were both happy to get back to our crappy hotel.