Location: Civitavecchia, Italy

We probably should’ve expected the fireworks. When we arrived in Civitavecchia last night (after a very smooth albeit very long journey), we discovered there was some sort of street festival going on and mobs of people were clogging the street right in front of our hotel — our driver (who didn’t speak English) had to drop us off a couple blocks away and indicate with hand gestures and slow Italian pronounciation where we needed to go. Apparently he didn’t speak slowly enough, cause it took us half an hour to fight our way through the crowds to the hotel’s front door.

I was surprised to see that we had a loft-style room where the bed was up a flight of stairs but everything else was downstairs. Not super convenient. Plus, despite an abundance of switches on the walls we could not figure out how to turn on the bedside lamps, so I couldn’t really read in bed, but oh, well. Anyway, we found a Subway for supper and crashed around 8:30 p.m. (It was a full 24 hours from the time we left our house to when we finally got to go to sleep.) We both woke up to what sounded like artillery fire at 10:00 — naturally there were fireworks for the festival.

We did eventually get a good night’s sleep and had no trouble boarding our ship this morning. The fact that we only packed one carry-on suitcase each has been a blessing — no waiting around for luggage to come off the carousel at the airport, no leaving our luggage out for the cruise line to bring to us later. Very nice.

As Justin would say: adventure is out there!