The overnight journey into Rome went a lot smoother than our first. We all kind of felt into a routine to prepare for bed time – rather amusing how easily we slipped into it! Pat flew in from London (he couldn’t take the time off from work for the other Europe legs) so we were all reunited again as a family. Rome gave us an absolutely amazing start to the trip with gorgeous blue skies and extremely warm weather. I kind of accidentally led the family the long way around to our apartment … but we got there in the end!

Rome was absolutely heaving with tourists in a way that Salzburg wasn’t. Even after only a couple of days of relative quiet it was a bit of a shock to the system!

Highlights of the trip included:

Walking around seeing all the Squares, buildings and markets

Touring the Vatican. Lines and crowds at the Vatican were ridiculously long and large. Something to do with a tourist alert so security was really tough – and of course this had a knock on effect on the number of people inside. Great idea to do the guided tour though – everyone really appreciated the almost insider information to the Vatican. Even though I’d been on that tour before because we had a different tour guide he gave his spin and chose different art to discuss.

Touring the Colosseum. Again it was very worth doing the guided tour of the Colosseum. Despite the large number of people milling about with your own tour there is a sort of sense of privacy or exclusiveness which makes the visit more meaningful than it would otherwise be.

Riding these kind of pedalo type things in the Villa Borghese – a beautiful park in Rome. I’ve never laughed so much in my life. If you didn’t get one of electric pedalos it was very hard to ride – unfortunately that was us! Getting around these sculptures were tricky too!

Gelati. Lots and lots of gelati. In one day we had about five cones I’m sure including about three of them in the space of about an hour! Patrick had this list of top gelati stores to go to – one store was absolutely overwhelmingly busy. You had to get your “ticket” first and then fight your way through three people thick layer crowds just to even see the flavours on offer. Crazy.