London – Day 7

We get up this morning and the weather has done a complete 180, it’s cold and rainy.  I decide to try and search the net for a pub that is showing the Hawks v Sydney game and after a long search I only come across two pubs, one is miles away and the other is 2 tube stops away in pretty much the next suburb of Fitzrovia.....you little beautyyyyy! We get dressed and head down there to check out the game not knowing what to expect and we think if the pub turns out to be crap we’ll just head off and do something else. We get out of the underground station at Regent’s Park and from here we need to walk about 400m to the pub but it is raining to the point that we need umbrellas so we stop at a shop selling cheap crappy ones that will probably only last us about a day and we fork over the £10 for 2 of them. We continue walking looking for the pub which is called Jetlag Sports bar. It’s a pretty easy walk and we are the first to arrive just before 10:30am. The bar maid invites us in and puts the telly on and within 5 minutes the footy is on and we are about 20 minutes from bounce down. Over the course of the next 20 minutes a few other guys rock up to watch the footy and the NRL which is also being shown on another telly in the same spot over our shoulder. This is a great little pub and considering it’s getting colder outside and the rain is not letting up we feel justified in sitting here all morning having a few drinks and watching the footy rather than being out touristing. It was made even better when the Hawks gave the Swans and old fashion belting. Once the game is over we get back on the tube and head to Piccadilly Circus so the kids can stock up on all the trinkets (shit) they want to buy. There are a million of these little trinket shops around and given the chance the kids would visit every one of them. We made a deal with them after the second day, do not enter another one of these shops and on the last day of each place you can go crazy. So after they have wasted their dough purchased their trinkets, we head back to Covent Garden for some late lunch. The weather is still dodgy so we find somewhere warm and undercover. After lunch we head back to the apartment to pack up our gear so we don’t have to do it tomorrow morning. All we have to do tomorrow now is give the apartment a quick clean before making our way to the train station for the next leg of the holiday, Edinburgh. The weather has fined up by the time we head out for dinner which is good for our last night. We don’t wander far though, there is too many good restaurants close by to our apartment. The wood fired pizza at Rossopomodoro’s is fantastic and afterwards we stop for our standard late night coffee on the way home. We’ll miss London but the time has come to move on.

Watching the game at Jetlag Sports Bar - Go Hawks!!

Pano of the Regent's Park tube station

London – Day 6

We wake up again to a stunning day weather wise. Blue skies and by the end of the day it has become quite hot and our pasty white Scroop skin is now lathered in sunscreen. It sucks when as an Aussie you still have to put on sunscreen during the English Autumn! Earlier, Kris and I had set the alarm for 2am so we could get up and ring the vet back in Perth to check on Harvey. The vet lets us know that Harvey has improved slightly but is still very dehydrated and is still not eating but he has not deteriorated which is good news. We head back to bed and sleep in until around 7 when Mia and I do the Sainsbury run. After brekkie we get moving as we are off to see Windsor Castle (Her Majesty’s Royal Residence...or something like that). This involves a tube ride to Paddington Station and then a train ride to Windsor. Once we get to Paddington we have to head above ground to the main station to buy some tickets for the Paddington-Windsor leg. I am absolutely amazed at the size of this train station and this station is only one of many this size dedicated to domestic train travel from London. Purchasing tickets looks like a mission but it ends up being pain free with the automatic ticket machine. Finding out which platform to go to however proves a lot harder so we ask advice from a woman at the info desk. Lucky we did because she informs us that we need to make a change at Slough. We jump on the train that is sitting on the station and within 5 minutes we are on our way. I was expecting this journey to be about 40-45 minutes but I’m sure it only took about 15-20. We jump off and move to another platform and jump on the train to Windsor once it arrives. Now, we hadn’t researched Windsor Castle a great deal, it was kind of a last minute replacement for a visit to Warwick Castle which we had planned to do before leaving Australia but since being here we have realised that Warwick Castle was frickin miles away and we don’t think the kids were up for it. So anyway, as we round a bend on the train close to Windsor we see through the window this incredibly massive castle that seems to take up the entire view. We were blown away with its size. We pull into Windsor train station and I must say, prior to our arrival our expectation of visiting Windsor Castle was that there would be this big castle pretty much in the middle of nowhere, we would check it out, get back on the train and go home. Well bugger me we walk out of the train station smack bang into this amazing village-suburb. I later realise that Windsor shares its border with the town of Eton, famous for Eton College. The main shopping streets are like malls and would be at least the size of both Hay Street and Murray Street malls in Perth. There were shops and restaurants and people everywhere. And here I was worried before we left that if I needed to take a leak while we were visiting Windsor I’d have to do it behind a tree!! Dumb arse Aussie award goes to me it seems. We instantly love this place though; it has real character and is what we sort of expected from an English town. We grab some lunch before heading up to do the Windsor Castle tour. The tour ends up being a cracker, the history and the excessive lavishness and to the realisation that we walked in places and on carpet that the queen and many of the royal families before her had was pretty overwhelming. It’s something that is hard to explain unless you’ve done it. It ends up being a real highlight of the week. We finish the tour and decide we’d take a walk over to Eton (which is not very far, about 500m) to get a coffee. We stumble on this pretty swanky looking cafe. We walk in and realise within about a millisecond that we are not the rich clientele that usually frequents this joint. We hold firm though in our sweaty t-shirts, back pack, baseball caps and with the kids only half way through their Mr Whippy ice-creams to request a table outside on the terrace. We ditch the coffee and decide on a bottle of wine instead and it ends up being a pretty good arvo. We eventually make it back to the train station for our journey home which gets us there around 6ish. We shower up as quickly as we can to head out for dinner which happens to be back at Jamie’s Italian. Everyone agrees it has ended up being a pretty awesome day.

At Slough waiting for the train to Windsor

 

The swanky café in Eton on the River Thames

Kris doing the nightly coffee run on the way home from dinner

 

Covent Garden "Seven Dials".
Our apartment is about 40m down the road behind the dial, the pub is on the left corner. On the right corner just out of picture is the Cambridge Theatre which is showing Matilda and the coffee shop that Kris is in is directly behind me.

 

London - Day 5

I am up a little later this morning; the kids were still in bed when I left to get some groceries around 7ish. It is another amazing morning, blue skies and the forecast is for a maximum of 28. By the time I get back from Sainsbury’s the kids are waiting for me. All I see is their heads hanging out of the window and their waving to me. The kitchen and lounge windows face the road and we are about 3 floors up. We have our usual fruit and yogurt brekkie and we head out for some morning tea about 10ish. We plan on doing very little today, Mia and I are still struggling with sore throats and colds. We decide that after morning tea we will just hang around the Covent Garden area. There is so much to see and do within Covent Garden that we are sure we can keep ourselves busy. We come home for a light lunch and while we are here we get some bad news about Harvey. Rebecca has been looking after Harvey for us and a couple of days ago he came down ill and it has become bad enough for the vet to decide he needs to stay over in at the clinic for a night or two so they can keep an eye on him and try and determine what may be the problem. We are all very concerned and being so far away makes it harder to know what to do. We plan on getting up at 2am (9am Perth time) to call the vet and try and get some news on how he is going. We also feel for Rebecca, she has been amazing running Harvey back and forth to the vets and giving him his medication. Everyone is a little upset so we decide to go out to keep our minds off Harvey and the Covent Garden market area seems a good spot to help with that. Kris and I have a drink in one of the cafe/bars there and the kids go over to watch the buskers in the main square. We kill an hour or so and keep walking in the direction of Trafalgar Square. When we get there it is packed. There is a heap of buskers here today so we watch a few before continuing on home. After a couple of hours relaxing at the apartment we head off for dinner. The streets are ridiculous, people everywhere. Not sure if it is always like this on a Wednesday night or if the magnificent weather has got everyone out for the night. It ends up being an early night and we are home by half 8. Hopefully the news on Harv’s will be better tomorrow.

Toilet Issues

Tyler and Mia have grown up in a house where they have had two toilets since they were born. Coming on holiday and having to share just the one toilet seems to be tough for the kids especially when they have to go in there after me. I suggested they harden up a bit but Mia is an innovative young girl and she came up with a fix of her own.....

London – Day 4

This morning we are up and out by 8:30 with our first stop being Lords “The home of cricket”. We need to ride the tube from Covent Garden to the Warwick Avenue stop. This requires 1 change at Piccadilly Circus and takes us about 25 minutes. Once out of the Warwick Avenue station we then need to walk about a kilometre to the main gates at Lords. The tour went for about an hour and a half and it was fantastic. It also made us realise how much we missed out on with the tour we did last time we were here. Due to a cricket game being played on the day we did the tour we didn’t get to see the Pavilion and long room, the changing rooms or the media centre. I was in my element and I think Tyler was getting visions of his name going up on the honour board for when he makes his first hundred playing for Australia. The only issue we had was when this pompous old fool at the entrance of the museum who thought I’d taken a photo started yelling at me not to take photos inside the museum. It wasn’t even me; it was some Indian dude next to me. Anyway, it was a great tour and I would highly recommend it and our guide was fantastic. When the tour finished we walked back about ½ km where the street was lined with cafe’s to have some lunch. This seemed to be a very rich area with lots of business men and plenty of very expensive cars. It kind of reminded me of Double Bay in Sydney. After lunch we decided to go and check out the Abbey Road crosswalk as it was only a kilometre or so away. The kids were starting to wane a bit by now but they soldered on. The whole crosswalk thing was rubbish but being so close we had to do it. We walk the 1½ km back to the tube and this time we were off to Wimbledon. This takes us about ½ an hour by train and when we get out of the Southfield tube station we are faced with another 1km walk to the front gates. We pay the £70 which seemed a bit steep and we set off with our guide at 3pm. The Wimbledon tour ended up being so much better than we were expecting and was well worth the money. Our guide, a very proper English lady, was fantastic. The highlight was definitely Centre Court. Once that was over we were then faced with the trek back to the train station and the half hour train ride home. The kids had been dragged all around London and were well and truly shagged. We got back to the apartment and had a quick shower and headed straight back out for dinner. Tyler has been begging for us to go back to the Jamie Oliver restaurant we went to the night we arrived so we promised him that tonight we will go. We walk down there and the place is empty, it’s shut. There is a sign on the wall saying Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Union Jacks is closed due to a fire. Bugger, had we missed something? I don’t remember a fire. So we end up having dinner at this trendy joint called Bill’s and it was good. After dinner we head to the ice cream shop for the kids and the coffee shop for me and Kris and into bed. It’s after 9 and we are all buggered. We think it will be a slow day tomorrow.


Footnote: On our tour of Lords there was this dorky guy correctly answering all the obscure cricket questions put to him by the tour guide and Kris nudges me and says “That’s Frank Spencer”. I couldn’t stop laughing!
Check out the photo at the bottom.

Tyler and me at the Home of Cricket

Kris and Mia at Beatles crosswalk

Mia and Tyler at the desk where the tennis stars get interviewed at Wimbledon

Frank Spencer?

Do not buy a MAXROAM sim

Avoid overseas roaming charges they said, get a Maxroam sim and get “Low cost roaming in 200+ countries” they said. So I purchased 2 of these Maxroam sim cards, one for me and one for Kris. I stick the first sim in my phone and arrive in London and try to make a call to the owner of the accommodation where we are staying while I’m sitting on the train from Heathrow....sweet FA. Nothing. I buggerise around with this piece of crap and finally it decides to wake up. I get the call in, all good. The next day....ZIP. Nothing...again. I buggerise around....again. I finally get it to work. I spend about 10 minutes on the net over about an 8 hour period (I would have spent more but it only worked occasionally) and then sweet FA....again. So I email this mob and they say “sorry, you have no remaining credit and you won’t be able to access you sim until you add more credit”. WOW, way to beat those roaming charges, thanks MAZROAM....you bunch of thieving pricks!

By the way, the second sim worked exactly the same as the first sim. One minute she’s sweet. The next minute, ZIPPO!!

So, if you are planning a trip overseas my suggestion would be to maybe try another sim card provider because MAXROAM are crap.

1 star.

London – Day 3

This morning I was up early and I headed out at 6am to get some groceries. The grocery store we normally go to doesn’t open until 7am but there is another one on The Strand down towards the River Thames that opens at 6 so I wander down there. It is another beautiful morning with just a bit of crispness in the air. The store turns out to be a dinky little 7-Eleven style shop so I can only get half the stuff I need. I get home, we have some brekkie and Tyler and I head back out to the other store we normally go to and get the rest of the stuff we need. Funny thing I realised, AECOM’s London office is just over the road. We are off to the London Eye this morning so I convince the family it would be a nice walk rather than use the tube. Everyone’s on board so we start the trek. We walk through the Covent Garden markets, along the Thames and across the bridge to the London Eye. We buy our tickets and go straight into the “London Eye 4D experience” which is a 4D movie of the London Eye and is really cool. After that it is straight to the wheel and no queue means we can jump straight on. Visibility is excellent today, better than last time we were here. We decide to continue walking after we get off and we make our way over Westminster Bridge past Big Ben towards Westminster Abbey, then along St. James Park past the guards watching over 10 Downing St to the Horse Guards parade. We are getting peckish so we continue on into St. James Park to try and find some morning tea. There is this little kiosk selling waffles and cakes so we get some stuff there. One thing we have noticed about London is it’s bloody expensive to buy food. And that’s before the woeful $AUD kicks in. We are not getting anywhere near as much value as our last trip here. It doesn’t help either when the food you buy is crap and the coffee tastes like shit! So we eat the crappy food and tip the coffee out and get cranky that we were slugged the equivalent of 30 AUD for the privilege and continue on. We start heading toward home through Piccadilly Circus and Leister Square and make it home to have some lunch. All up it was a 6km round trip and the kids haven’t whinged or complained once. Good onya kids. After lunch we tube it to London Tower and pay our £60 entrance fee. This is where they guard the crown jewels. I was thinking this was going to be rubbish but Kris really wanted to see it. I said to Kris see could have checked out the family jewels for free! Anyway, it ends up being really interesting and well worth the dough. We feel it’s been a tough day so far and we have developed a thirst. So we get back on the tube and head to one of the pubs near our apartment down towards Leister Square. We have a few drinks overlooking all the people moving about. A couple of hours pass and it’s time for dinner. Tonight we are going to Jamie’s Italian which just happens to be about 50m closer to our apartment. The food at Jamie’s was fantastic and very well priced. The only hiccup was when Tyler and I went to the toilet. There was this little old lady walking in front of us and she opens the door to what we could only assume was the lady’s toilet so we continue on assume the gents must be the next door. When we get there we see a huge letter F on the door. We back up and yep, the little old lady has gone in the gents! The door had a huge M on it so her eyesight must have been really shit. Tyler is laughing his head off on realising the old duck is in the gents. We go in and we do the urinal thing while she must be behind the dunny door. Tyler and I are in stitches so I finish up and bail ASAP and leave Tyler in there with the old bird. He comes out and says “Dad, you should have seen her face when she saw me”. It was pretty funny. We finish dinner and go to the ice-cream shop and get the kids an ice-cream while Kris and I get a coffee and head back to the apartment. Tomorrow we are doing Lords and Wimbledon. Last time we did Lords there was a game on and it was hammering with rain so we weren’t allowed to do half the tour. Hopefully tomorrow’s tour will be better.

Waiting in the Underground

The Sussex pub

 

Jamie's Italian



London – Day 2

This morning Mia has woken up with a sore throat and a bit of a temperature. I also have a bit of a scratchy throat so it looks like the lack of sleep and lack of fruit and veg is catching up with us. We have brekkie at the apartment and the kids watch a few cartoons before we get moving for Camden Market at about 10 o’clock. The underground route is simple, about 9 minutes straight up the Northern Line. We walk to Leister Square station, buy our 7 day Oyster cards for the train and say to the man “how do we get to the Northern Line”? He says “It’s closed; you’ll need to take the bus”.....great! We head back up the stairs to street level and manage to find a bus heading in that direction. It is actually a nice change as we can see a lot more from the second deck of a bus. We arrive at Camden Town and stroll along the street toward Camden lock checking out all the tacky souvenir shops and weirdo clothes shops. There was some awesome shoe shops but a lot of it was all a bit same same. When we get to Camden Lock it’s clear it’s a lot more alive with amazing food stalls selling all types of food from all over the world and the smell is amazing. We talk about just eating our way through to the other side and start with a crepe each. We keep moving through the stalls and all of a sudden Kris says “Paul, Paul, I think I’m gunna vomit”. It was pretty hilarious watching her holding it in while scoping the place for an appropriate spot to unleash. As she is frantically rushing around trying to find a spot she manages to get a lung full of fresh air which aborts the spew. I was worried about her but I must admit I was hanging out to see what her plan was because there were heaps of people around and no real place to chuck a spew. That sort of put a stop to the “eat our way around” thing we were thinking of. So we head back down to the start of Camden Town and decide to spend the arvo at Hyde Park. We bus it back to King’s Cross Station and train it to Hyde Park entrance.  We walk through the park to the lake where there is a restaurant that sells rolls and cakes. We buy some lunch and get charged a king’s ransom and continue walking along the lake until we find a good patch of lawn. After that we wander around the lake and check out the Princess Diana memorial before making our way back to the tube. Hyde Park was beautiful and it was something we didn’t get an opportunity to do last time because the weather was dodgy. Once back at the apartment Kris decides to have a read (that’s code for sleep) and me and the kids go out and wander the streets of Covent Garden checking out the shops. These streets around our apartment are packed on weekends and it has a great atmosphere.  Time for dinner and we are craving some meat and three veg so we decide to check out the many steak houses down the road. We decide on eating at “Steak & Co”. Crap name but awesome food. They serve your steak on a hot stone just shy of how you want it. I ordered medium rare so it arrives on the stone rare. We then have to take the steak off the stone, cut the steak into pieces, put some garlic butter on the hot stone, put the steak back on with some rock salt and wait for it to be cooked to your requirements. When it’s done, whack it back on your plate and dowse it in a red wine jus. I was trying to work out if I have ever in my life had a better steak and I can’t remember a time. If you’re ever in London, eat here, it’s good. Tomorrow we are going to do some genuine touristy stuff. The kids want to do the London Eye again and Kris and I would like to check out the Tower Bridge. Tomorrows forecast, 24 and not a cloud in the sky!

Ummm....don't think so!

What a great idea, you can take a dump
while trying some shoes on....

Camden Lock food

Mmmmm, crepes.

 

**Freak Watch**
And Dad takes out round 2.

London – Day 1

Today we were up and out before 8. It is a magnificent day; the sun is shining, blue skies and it’s not too cold. The weather forecast for the next week appears to be the same if not getting better, you little ripper!!  We headed down to a Patisserie near Leicester Square for breakfast. This is the same patisserie we stumbled across on our first morning of our last holiday. After breakfast we wonder around a bit and find ourselves down at Trafalgar Square. We don’t have any plans at this stage apart from stocking up on groceries, going out for lunch, going to the pub and then going out for dinner.  We head back to the apartment to grab a few things and I realise I have forgotten my battery charger and my battery is dead. There is a camera shop along Oxford Street so we go for a wander and check out the shops while we are there. One thing about Covent Garden, it is very close to most of the main areas of London and everything is either walking distance or a short tube ride. After that, it’s back down to Covent Garden Market area for lunch. Being a Saturday the place is jam packed but we manage to find a spot at a restaurant overlooking the buskers. We order some food, have a few drinks and just ease into what will be our life for the next six weeks. We finish lunch and decide to go find a pub. There are a couple of pubs within 50m of our apartment so we go to the one we didn’t go to last time. It’s only small so a lot of people drink outside on the little cobble stoned street amongst the huge crowds of people walking back and forth. It’s something that just wouldn’t be allowed in Perth but it happens everywhere here. We drink inside because the kids need to sit down but that’s ok because it’s a great spot. We have a few drinks and get told at 6:20, “Ahhh, can you guys drink up because the kids aren’t allowed in the pub after 6”. Fine, time for dinner anyway. We make our way to Rossopomodoro, an Italian joint also about 50m from our apartment but in the other direction. The one thing we are not short of around our apartment is restaurants, pubs and shops. We don’t stay long though; I think yesterday’s long flight and the tough day we have just had is catching up with us. We are home around 8 and call it a day. We have decided we are going to do Camden Markets tomorrow. With tomorrow being Sunday and with beautiful weather forecast I'm sure it is a bad idea, but the lure of seeing freaks, and lots of them, is clouding our judgement.

Kris and Mia at Lunch

 

Tyler and Me at lunch

 

**FREAK WATCH**
Tyler wins round 1 of freak watch, probably not a
great effort but better than any of us could manage.
We are all hoping to hit pay dirt tomorrow!

We're here!

Man that took a lot longer than we remembered but we arrived safely in London and the flight over was pretty uneventful, no vomiting from Mia, it seems Mia never spews when you go prepared. I'm sure she'll spew just at that moment when we've dropped our guard. The only real action came when Tyler decided to challenge me at PONG on the in-flight entertainment system. After wiping him off the court in straight sets (3 zip) and feeling quite content with my performance, I decided to watch a movie while Tyler took to the practice court. He threw down the challenge again a couple of hours later and he soon had me down 2 sets to love, clearly the practice had paid off. In good old Tyler fashion he was giving me a bit of a sledge, saying "Geez Dad, you need to get some practice into ya, it would be good if you could make a game of it". Cheeky little bugger. Needless to say he beat me 3-1. He then took me apart again 3-0 and I lost interest in PONG after that. We got through customs at Heathrow and followed the signs to the London Underground for the final 50 minute journey to the accommodation. We popped out at the Covent Garden tube stop and it is exactly as we remember, bustling with Friday night revellers. We take the short walk to our apartment and we are shagged at this point. In the past 46 hours I had only managed 3 hours sleep and Kris had managed not much more. We get to the apartment, drop our stuff and head out. We may be tired but we are also hungry. We find a little restaurant in the Covent Garden Market area and check out the menu that is displayed outside. It just so happens it’s a Jamie Oliver restaurant called Union Jacks. We order some food have a few drinks before heading back to the apartment. The 46 hours has now turned into 48 hours and it's fair to say we are buggered!

New Blog Features

We have added some new features to the blog for this holiday.

Interactive maps with clickable icons which will direct you to all our accommodations websites.

Photos page (that works this time) which will have updated photos and videos including those taken by Mia and Tyler.

Itinerary: An updated itinerary that also includes clickable web links to view our accommodation.

Contact Us page has been updated and emails can be sent via the funky new form.

Follow by email button so you can submit your email address and whenever we publish a new post the post will be delivered direct to your inbox. Located just to the left under the Griswolds photo.

Feel free to leave a comment at the end of a post and hopefully it should work better than last time.

4 Weeks 'till Take-off

Most of the hard work has been completed now and we are just waiting for August 30 to arrive. All our train journeys are booked and paid for. We managed to get our final train journey booked just around the same time we start hearing news reports of a series of serious train accidents occurring throughout Europe. It is a little unnerving but certainly not off putting. We are now just paying final accommodation payments as they arise (most of the accommodation needs to be paid in full before leaving Australia) and we only have a couple of payments left. We also managed to book the car that will get us around Scotland for the two days starting in Edinburgh and finishing in Glasgow. We went for a little luxury renting a BMW 320d. The photos of the car look good so I hope when we pick it up it's not a pile of shite.
There are few updates to the blog this time around which I will outline in my next post.
Other than that, not much else going on.

8 Weeks To Go

We are starting to feel the excitement build now. With only 8 weeks to go the past couple of months has seen a fair bit of activity happening with respect to the organising of this holiday and with the more activity going on, the more excited we seem to get. We have booked a fair chunk of the train travel with tickets purchased for the London to Edinburgh leg, the London to Paris leg on the Eurostar, the Paris to Brugge leg, the Brugge to Wurzburg leg and the Wurzburg to Salzburg leg. We still have the train rides to Switzerland and through Italy to go as well as the Glasgow to London leg. This leg is proving tougher than most. The London to Edinburgh leg cost us a total of £78 and that's for a 6 1/2 hour train ride. The Glasgow to London journey is virtually identical and the cheapest we can currently find this for is £229. So I'm holding off for the moment in the hope it will reduce in price but this means logging on to the dozen or so websites everyday and trudging through the various ticket booking systems. But for what effectively amounts to a AU$250 additional charge, I'm happy to do it. Again this trip, when booking the train travel I have relied heavily on the man in seat 61 and this is my start point before doing anything. I log on to www.seat61.com prior to planning my journey and use the information and links available to get me to the best sites to purchase tickets. Without the information this man has available on his website, it would be almost impossible to organise so many train journeys over so many destinations and countries. There is just too much research required to be able to organise the train travel we need to get the extremely cheap prices without this website. If you ever want to travel by train, anywhere, visiting the seat61 website is a must. In addition to purchasing train tickets, we also bought a new suitcase but this is no ordinary suitcase. On our last trip through Europe, we bought 2 of these "Osprey Sojourn" bags. These are quite large bags that have wheels but double as a backpack. They weren't cheap, about $400 a pop but these are quality bags. They are as rugged as buggery and we gave them a fair flogging during our last European holiday and they stood up to the rigours. So we decided to buy another one but a smaller slightly different version. This is the sister pack with the same features but it has more pockets and it has a smaller removable back pack. I know it doesn't sound exciting but when you you see this thing, it is!! This will be the bag that the kids get to pull around. The next few weeks will be spent sending emails to confirm our accommodation bookings and paying the balance on a few of them as well as completing the train ticket purchases. Hopefully we don't get any unexpected return emails like the one we received from our little friend Kathy a couple of months ago....

"Mia models the suitcase"

"Mia modelling again"

4 Months 'till Take-Off

4 months to go and our flights and all our accommodation is booked. We will be flying Emirates again and we will be staying mostly in apartments with hotels for the single night stays in Inverness, Glasgow and Wurzburg. Everything so far has gone smoothly, except for our little friend Kathy at JF Properties who let us know the booking for our "La Terrasse du Marais" apartment in Paris "was secured" and she would "send the paperwork through shortly". We spent weeks trying to find an apartment in Paris scouring through dozens of websites every night with little success. We wanted to stay in a similar area in Marais to where we had stayed last time. It was difficult to find exactly what we wanted, so in the end we gave up and thought we'd send our little friend Kathy an email to ask if the apartment we'd stayed in last time was available. It was, so we said we would like to book it. She replied to let us know she had booked the dates in and those dates were secured and she would send us the paperwork shortly. Now, we've dealt with Kathy before and she wasn't the most competent of people we've ever dealt with. We were always the ones following up on her to get contracts or info because she'd take weeks getting back to us so it didn't phase us that 2 months had gone by and still no paperwork. While booking for the last of our accommodation in Inverness I remembered I still hadn't heard from our little friend. I thought before I email her to check the status of the paperwork I'll just check the reservations page on her website. There it was, dates booked at the start of our stay and dates booked at the end of our stay with 3 days available in between. "KATHHHHYYYYY". A quick email confirmed the worst. She had not secured the dates and booked people on our dates either side of us. We knew she was useless but this was a new level of incompetence. We were now back on the hunt for accommodation in Paris with a 2 month layoff, meaning there would be fewer apartments available. We scoured the sites again non stop for two days and it seemed by the look of what was available this was going to cost us about $100 a night more. Finally, out of nowhere pops up this great little apartment in a great location for the same price as what we had.......or thought we had. So we booked the apartment and are now back on track. In the next couple of months I will start organising train tickets. With all the experience gained from the last holiday this should be a fairly simple process.........

Our Original 2011 Holiday Description

The Scroop family are hitting the holiday road for a six week Griswold style European vacation. Starting in London we will train our way to Paris in France, Munich in Germany, Luzern, Zermatt & St Moritz in Switzerland and then on to Venice, Florence and Rome in Italy. Along the way we will head out to Euro Disney, have a HofBrau or three at the Oktoberfest, scale the Matterhorn, ride the Glazier Express and pretty much eat and drink our way to an empty bank account!

Day 44 Rome – Perth:

Well, that’s it. This morning we leave for Rome airport for our plane flight home. It has been a fantastic adventure and one we will not forget for a long time. It feels like we have been away for ages but no doubt once we are home it will feel like we have only been away for the weekend. We do feel like we are ready to come home but not ready to go back to work. We certainly wouldn’t be opposed to heading off to another destination but obviously that can’t happen. We have been to some amazing places and seen some amazing things. We all agree though that London was our favourite city. It’s a fantastic place and it always helps when everything goes to plan as it did here. The accommodation in London was probably the best as well. Even though the accommodation in Florence was fantastic, it was let down by the constant noise which eventuated in a serious lack of sleep. We all agree that Paris was the most beautiful city and it also had the best tourist attractions. We all voted Switzerland as our favourite country. Switzerland was a massive surprise packet and it just blew us away. It has the most amazing views, beautiful fresh air, lots of things to do and the people there were very nice. We think it would be a bit of a toss-up for the nicest people between Munich, Switzerland and London. Unfortunately, the rudest people can be shared between the Parisians and the Italians. We all agreed that Rome has the best churches including the most amazing church, St. Peters Basilica. The history in Rome is beyond comparison and this place makes you feel very insignificant given the fact it has been around for so long. Unfortunately for us though Italy probably didn’t live up to expectations in other areas. Rome seems to be a city of contrast; it’s either black or white here. You can walk into a shop and get rude, arrogant service and walk into the next shop and have some of the loveliest service you’d ever get. You can go to a restaurant and get bad food and walk next door and get amazing food. It didn’t help that not a great deal really went right for us in Italy right back to the first time we stepped on a Trenitalia train for our journey to Milan. We have also had problems with the accommodation in Italy starting back in London when our Florence apartment got cancelled on us. The massive crowds of people and the hawkers shoving stuff in your face can take the gloss of some things as well. But all in all it has been a great holiday and one we have all enjoyed and we just wish we could fly back to London and start it all over again.

Day 43 Rome:

Well it was our last full day of our holiday today and what a fantastic day it was, one of the best days we have had. We wanted to get out of Rome on a day trip today but we were undecided on what to do. We did initially want to go to Pompeii but once we found out it was a 5-6 hour round trip we changed our mind. We got talking to a very friendly Indian guy in the souvenir shop we have been to a few times downstairs near our apartment the other day who claims to be Harbhajan Singh’s cousin. I said “That’s amazing mate, because I’m Ricky Ponting’s brother!!” Anyway, he told us about Ostia Antica, a place of ruins that used to be a thriving port town back in the first century AD with reports of 100,000 residents. We did a bit of research and the place sounded interesting and it was only 45 minutes away via a couple of trains. So we get walking up to the main train terminal which is about a 20 minute walk to catch the metro to the Pyrimide station which is about 4 stops. We follow the signs to our next train on the Lido line and this takes about 20-30 minutes to get to Ostia Antica. We had no idea about this place before being told and the only half decent info we could get was from Rick Steve’s website. We followed “Ricks” instructions and got there with ease. We started wandering around this place and our initial impressions were “this looks like it could be a little bit boring”. But as we continued on this ancient city that dates back more than 2000 years to the times of Christ just starts to appear in front of us and we are gobsmacked. We really felt like we got a great feeling for what it was like living back in this time. The awesomeness of this place cannot be explained and it’s one of those “you have to be there” sort of things to really appreciate it. For us, this place was so amazing that we reckon it is as good as the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, that’s how good it is. We even enjoyed it more than the Colosseum and that place is amazing. We spent pretty much the whole day there and could have stayed longer but it was getting late and we didn’t arrive back at our apartment until about 6pm. So we clean up and head out for dinner to our favourite Rome restaurant, Grill & Wine. Another fantastic meal and we get a snap of the kids with their favourite waiter. When we go to this restaurant the waiter always serves us and he calls Mia “princess” and Tyler “champion” and they lap it up. We leave there and go down to see our mate Valentino. We get our usual fix of gelato before getting a group snap with him as well. After that it’s off to our other mate, Habhajan’s cousin to buy a few more kg’s for the suitcase and then it’s off to the apartment to pack. It was great way to round off a great day and a fantastic holiday.

Day 42 Rome:

Today we are booked in for a tour of the Vatican at 10am. This is going to be pretty special we think. We opted for a “skip the line” tour because every time we have gone past the Vatican on the open top bus the line has been ridiculously long. This will ensure us of “no waiting”........just to repeat that.....“no waiting” to get into the Vatican museum and St. Peters Basilica. We leave the apartment for the 40 minute walk to St. Peters Basilica and get there in 25 minutes (way to go team!!). We find the meeting spot which is just outside the tour office about 400m from the basilica entrance and we wait. We had to be there 20 minutes early but we arrived with an extra 10 minutes up our sleeve. At this point the penny drops and I’m thinking if I’m doing a “skip the line” tour why am I sitting here waiting for half an hour??? I might as well be waiting in the queue with all the other people trying to get in. It gets to 10am and there is a heap of people waiting out the front of the office but no tour guide. At 10:10 some bird with a yellow sign walks out of the office and just starts walking in the direction of the Basilica, she doesn’t say anything, just starts walking. Half the people follow and half just hang around. We are thinking “is this our tour?” We’re looking around like idiots as are some other people and we ask this stupid, horrible woman from the tour company who is standing outside the front of the office if that was our tour and she just doesn’t answer us, as if we’re not even there. By this point the group have disappeared into the crowd, god knows where they’ve gone and we are still none the wiser. We go inside to ask for assistance, along with some other people and get told after about a 5 minute wait that “yes that was your tour and you need to find them and catch up”. There are a bazillion people out there how the hell do we find them??? We go running off but we have no hope of finding these people and Kris and I are absolutely fuming. We storm back to the office and we let rip and the lady behind the desk, who was actually quite nice, told us we didn’t actually have to be with the group and we could just go around to the entrance and we could go straight in. That was great but what about our tour guide, isn’t she meant to talk to us along on the tour and give us some info or something??? The woman behind the counter gives us directions to the entrance and it ends up being a 10 minute walk around the back of the Vatican. We get moving and make our way toward the Vatican entrance and the entire time I’m just about to explode like a kid with turrets syndrome. We get there and we go straight in and once inside we realise, that was the tour. These people slugged us to guide us from their bloody office to the front bloody entrance. They don’t take you on a tour through the Vatican, THAT WAS THE TOUR!!! And, we waited over an hour for the privilege!!! Kris turns to me and says “I’ve just about had it with this flipp’n joint” (note: some words were changed to accommodate the ‘G’ rating). This to us has just been another example of how they do things in Italy, they love taking your money but hate providing a service, or at least a good one. We continue on and try our hardest to calm down which takes a good half hour or so. We decide that we can’t let these people beat us. We walk through the Vatican on our way to the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican and the Sistine Chapel end up being amazing. It was a fantastic walk and a really amazing experience. We end up taking the tour guides exit from the Sistine Chapel. This is something we read on the internet. It takes you straight into St. Peters Basilica instead of the standard exit which takes you outside and back to the line. We enter the basilica and wow, this is special. What an amazing church. We wander around for a good while, go underneath the church floor to see the tombs of past Popes and we take the exit. What a fantastic experience that was and well worth all the hassles we had to go through. We decide to pop into Piazza Novona for lunch on the way home and get to enjoy the clown from last night doing his thing here as well while we eat. We walk back to the apartment and as like yesterday we whack a movie on for the kids while Kris and I have a kip before heading out for dinner back down at the Pantheon. Again, we head over to Valentino’s for gelato and back home to bed. A pretty good day in the end.

Day 41 Rome:

Today we don’t have a great deal planned so we are just going to walk around and see where we end up. We start off by walking down to Piazza Novona to see if we can find some paintings to bring home. This Piazza is basically where the artists sell their gear and it’s all pretty good stuff. We manage to find some cheapy paintings and we are on our way again. We decide to go over to Campo dei Fiori which is literally down the road. On the way we pass this bakery, Il Fornaio and decide to stop in for a snack. They sell some amazing cakes and biscuits and Kris and I spot these cakes that look a bit like an Apple Strudle type thing.......we think. We ask for one (to share) and the lovely lady starts telling us in her Italian English that they are beautiful and straight out of the oven. She comes over with one and grabs the back of Kris’s hand to put on the cake to show her it’s warm and keeps telling her “Beautiful, beautiful”. I quickly tell the woman we want two because I’m not sharing one of these little baby’s with Kris! We buy the kids something and we also indulge in a couple of varieties of biscuits as well. When we go to pay the lady throws a couple of other biscuits in for the kids for free. When we walk out we try the freebies and they are gold!! We can’t believe a biscuit can taste so good. We make our way into Campo dei Fiori and this place has come alive with fruit and vegie markets with old Italian men selling their stuff, it’s fantastic. We decide to hoe into our apple strudel thingy while it’s warm and this thing is amazing, I’m just about wetting myself it’s that good!!! We continue our walk and decide to head along the Arno river and up to this spot on this hill called Aventino. This hill gives you wonderful views over the river and the Trastevere area to St. Peters Basilica. The thing about this spot is it’s very quiet and not many people are here, a very pleasant change. We continue on to try and find the Bocca Della Verita or “the mouth of truth”. This is a marble face sculpture and if you put your hand in its mouth and don’t tell the truth it will cut your hand off (or something like that). So Kris and I are telling the kids on the way that after they stick their hands in we will be making a trip to the hospital to have their hands sewn back on and they’re pack’n their dacks. Tyler’s like “I’m not doing it”. We had a bit of a hard time finding it for a while and when we did find it we realised we had passed it in the open top bus about 3 times before. We leave there and we are all a bit shagged. We have walked miles today so we decide to walk home and the kids can watch a movie and Kris and I can have a good lie down. We get moving again around 6ish and down to the Pantheon for dinner. There is another demonstration going on (these people are always demonstrating) and the noise is unbearable so we decide to keep going and find somewhere else to eat. This proves harder than we think so we continue walking down to the Colosseum so I can take some photos of the Colosseum at night. The Colosseum looks amazing at night so I grab some snaps and we head back to the Pantheon. The demonstration has finished so we get some dinner. While we are eating, some busker dressed as a clown out in the piazza is doing some really funny stuff taking the urine out of people as they walk by so it ends up being a pretty fun night. We drop by our mate Valentino for gelato on the way through and then its home to bed.

I still can't get the photo's to work!

Day 40 Rome:

Today we are going on a tour through the Colosseum. We are pretty excited about this one so we decide to get up, have breakfast and get moving around 10ish. The tour is at 1pm and we have managed to get tickets for the underground section and up to the top level. This has only been open for the last year or so and it is only open for 6 months of the year. Places are hard to get so we feel very fortunate. We decide to walk down and take a look at some of the ruins along the way. The ruins are amazing but it can also be hard to stay attentive because you are always forced to look at bits of rubble and then try to imagine what was there. We grab a snack before going in and grabbing our tickets. The guide rocks up and we get moving. We are taken over the reconstructed section of the arena. This is a small section at one end of the Colosseum to try and give visitors an idea of what the arena looked like. A standard ticket to the Colosseum doesn’t allow you to walk on this section, even though we were only allowed on a small roped off area and we were not allowed to stop, it was worth extra dough. We head down underneath the arena level to where the gladiators and animals would have entered from. Even though the Colosseum was built back in 80 AD it’s still in pretty good shape. You get a good feel for what this place would have been like back then. They had some amazing engineering in this place. Something like 80 lifts were used to raise the gladiators and animals through trap doors in all different areas into the arena level. We continue on and back they way we came in and head around the “standard ticket” route before taking the stairs up to level 3, the upper level. From here you can get a real feel for what the atmosphere would have been like, more so than from the lower levels. It’s fantastic because it is only a small group of people and we have plenty of time and space to look around and take some snaps. This is rare in Rome as you will normally be sharing your immediate sq/m with about 600 other tourists and locals. The tour ends around 3pm and we take some more time to look around at the lower levels before heading out around 4pm. This was a real highlight and we would recommend that if anyone was going to do visit the Colosseum that they do this tour. We head back to the apartment and rest up before heading back to the restaurant we ate at last night, the Wine and Grill restaurant. As we were leaving last night I saw a couple order the chateaubriand for 2 and the waiter brought it to the table to ask them if it had been cooked to their satisfaction before moving to another table to carve it up. He then presented their plates to them complete with grilled vegies and this thing looked awesome. So I said to Kris we had to come back because I wanted that!! So it ends up being another magnificent meal and we leave shaking everyone’s hands again. On the same road is as the restaurant is “go to” gelato guy, Valentino, so we pop in for ice cream again before continuing on and back to the apartment.

Due to the internet connection at this apartment being ridiculously slow I am having a hard time uploading photos, so rather staying up till 1am like last night trying to get it to work I have opted for sleep instead.

Day 39 Rome:

Today we decided to do some walking. We are going to walk to the Spanish steps, then to Piazza del Popolo and then on to the Vatican which is about a 5km walk. We get started around 9:30 and it doesn’t take long to reach the Spanish steps. Our immediate impression is “Ok, there are some steps!!” We think that maybe there is some cultural significance relating to the steps or maybe there was a battle for the steps or something dramatic like that. Apparently not. It appears they were put there to help people get from the bottom of the hill to the top of the hill. Wow. Sorry but this one falls under the boring category for us and we only give it about 10 minutes of our attention. We keep moving toward the Piazza del Popolo with a detour into the gardens (with the word gardens used loosely). We wander for a bit until we come to a lookout point looking over the Piazza del Popolo. We take a few snaps and then make our way down to the Piazza. This is quite a nice Piazza with a large fountain in the centre. We notice of to the right of the Piazza is a church, the Basilica di Santa Maria del Popolo with a very unassuming facade but we decide we will go over and have a look. We walk inside and this church is amazing. Like most churches in Rome, the front facade gives nothing away to its incredible interior. The good thing is the kids are loving the churches as much as we are which makes it easy to spend some time in them. We look around for a while and admire the works. We take the exit and start our walk along Via Cola di Rienzo toward the Vatican. This is a beautiful road and it looks pretty clear to us that there is probably a bit of dough up this end of town. We turn left into the street that leads us to the Vatican entrance and like everything in Rome, you can’t take 5 steps without being hassled by someone wanting to sell you something, shoving something in your face or constantly approaching you like this particular group of guys trying to sell us tours of the Vatican. There is all sorts of guys shoving something in your face while you are quietly going about your day here in Rome, particularly the Asian morons trying to sell us absolute rubbish, there’s the “squashy ball guy”, the “scarf guy”, the “bubble blower guy”, the “handbag guy”, the “squishy face guy”, the “glass cube guy”, the “sunglasses guy”, the “umbrella guy” the “hat guy”, the “musical toy guy”, the “dancing mice guy”, the “dodge the paintings on the pavement guy” the “glow in the dark flick the thing in the sky guy” and it goes on and on and on and its relentless and beyond annoying. We finally make it past the gauntlet of morons to find ourselves at the front of St. Peters Basilica. What a sight from the outside this place is. We are looking forward to getting the opportunity to have a look inside. We didn’t plan to go inside today but just to come up and have a look and the queue is huge anyway so we decide we will catch the open top tour bus back to our apartment and grab some lunch. Once back at the apartment we decide to grab a drink along our street. We find a nice cafe, order some toasted sandwiches and a beer and wine and we are set for an hour or so. We are feeling a bit bushed so it’s back to the apartment and the kids watch a movie. After that it’s out for dinner. We are becoming sick of pizza and pasta so we need to order something different. We walk past the Trevi Fountain and up this street where there are heaps of restaurants and we find this restaurant that looks pretty good. This proves a great move. We all have something different and Kris has this steak that we all agree is better than anything we have had at Hippo Creek. It was very expensive but the food was fantastic and we walk out of there shaking everyone’s hand, the waiter, the owner and the chef. We head back down the street and pop in to see Valentino (he's our "go to" gelato guy) from Valentino’s Gelato and the kids get an ice cream. Then it’s off home to bed.

Day 38 Rome:

Today we wake up to a beautiful Rome day, a clear blue sky but it is just a little bit chilly. We have breakfast and get ready to leave the apartment and head down to catch the open top tour bus. We have done this in every city we have visited that has open top tour buses because it is the best way to get an immediate overview of the city and it helps us decide what we want to see in more detail later on. We get on the bus at the bus stop about 200m from our apartment and get moving. One thing becomes very apparent very quickly and that is we have a lot to try and see before we leave on Saturday arvo. This place is one attraction after another and there is no way we are going to be able to see it all before we leave so we are going to have to work out what we want to see and what gets missed out. Rome reminds us of Paris in the fact that there is just so much here. It is no way as pretty as Paris and it is not structured as well as Paris and I can only described it as an architectural grave yard with ruins and archaeological sites everywhere. But that is understandable when you realise that Rome was founded back in 753 BC. These guys were living here for 3 times longer than Australia has been around and that’s before we get to the AD part of time!!! That is extremely hard for me to grasp. The fact that there are so many ruins here makes the place look a little weird but it must be hard to build a city around so much history. Another thing that is very evident to us is there are a lot of little things scattered around the place like a statue on the corner of a building or a sculpture carved into a wall or a painting on a wall in the middle of nowhere and they are all still intact. I could imagine in Perth that some knob head would have smashed it or put graffiti all over it but it’s almost like even the knob heads over here respect the ancient parts of the city and it’s a no go zone or something. We finish a full route of the bus tour and decide to get off. We grab some stuff at the supermarket and take it back to the apartment. We don’t hang around we just change into warmer clothes because it is still chilly and head straight back out. We grab some lunch on the go and wander down to Piazza Navona. This is a great spot with lots of restaurants and artists selling their stuff. We just wander around before backtracking toward the Pantheon where we see people filing in through the front door so we join them. The Pantheon has this incredible front facade but the rest of it looks a bit like ruins so we were expecting the inside to be similar. The inside is in fact the reverse with amazing marble columns and the dome on top is massive. We sit and admire the place before getting out of there and moving on. We kept walking and decided to walk down and catch the green line of the open top tour bus. This takes you further south and out a bit further from the main centre. We walk to the stop which is about10 minutes away and ask the guy how long until it comes. He says around 35 minutes so we took a walk up these huge stairs around the back of this monument that lead to a church. We decide to pop inside and my god, we can’t believe this thing, it’s amazing. You would have had no idea from the outside that this church could be so amazing. We walk out and back to the green line bus only to realise our ticket doesn’t cover the green line, damn!! Never mind, back on the original bus for a spin until we decide to get back off again to go and explore the Trastevere area. This is an area on the other side of the river and it was very nice and worthy of another visit later we reckon. We head back and by this point we have covered some km’s. We get ready for dinner and head back down to the Pantheon to try and find a restaurant. We find a very nice spot at the front of the Pantheon where the food is great, the wine is fantastic (the red wine in Italy is the best we’ve ever had) there is entertainment in the piazza and we get an icecream before heading back to the apartment.



"The kids are pro's at this now, they know the best seats...."



"That is a very bad hair do dude.......I mean dudes"

"Piazza Novona"

"The beer and wine is starting to kick in"

"The Sprite has definitely kicked in!!"

"The beer and was HAS kicked in"

Day 37 Florence - Rome:

Today we leave Florence and make our final train journey to our final destination, Rome. The day starts with me getting out of bed to see the kids dressed and giving the place a bit of a clean up. They have also made themselves a platter of goodies and they are tucking in. Good onya kids. We need to pack again today and one thing is for sure, this is never a fun exercise. It’s getting harder and harder to fit all our gear into the available luggage space. We get that done around 10 but we don’t need to be out of the apartment until 11:30-12:00 so we head out for one last look at Florence. After that we head back to the apartment and grab our stuff and make our way down to the train station for our 12:40 train to Rome. Of course the train is running late, all our train journeys either within or into Italy on Trenitalia have been late. We were 2 minutes late in total on all the other train services we have used on this holiday but the best Trenitalia have managed so far is 15 minutes late on the Milan to Venice route. In addition to that we continue to get crappy advice from anyone wearing a Trenitalia uniform as we get directed to the wrong carriage and then directed back to where we were in the first place. We get on and someone is sitting in our seat so we tell the old codger to get out, (he’s managing to use all 4 of our seats) we are experts at dealing with these people now and it’s a 10 second exercise for him to pack up all his gear and move on. The train journey is a good one with wonderful views out of the window of the Italian country side and all its farms and vineyards. We have decided to treat ourselves on this leg and have a driver pick us up at the train station and take us to our apartment because we are sick of lugging this heavy load of suitcases around. We get to Rome and wait in the spot we had arranged with the apartment people and all we need now is to see a guy with a sign saying SCROOP! We wait.....and we wait..........and we wait. No bloody driver!! We take two seconds to realise where we are and then we remember, we are in Italy and it seems these people can’t get anything right. So half an hour goes by and we are none impressed so we decide to catch a cab. We approach a cab driver and we tell him where we want to go and he informs us he can’t do it, there is a demonstration on today and it’s too hard for this guy to get us within a 50 mile radius of our apartment. Italy is starting to wear thin with us about now as we realise we have to take the underground train. We lug the 6 ½ ton of luggage back down to the metro station, and carry it all down the stairs because escalators are post 1356 and god knows it’s too hard to whack a couple of those in. We find our train and get on board and exit at our stop smack bang in the middle of the demonstration as it’s making its way down the street. We battle the crowds down the street with all our gear and finally reach our apartment. We get greeted by the apartment owner’s parents who are a wonderful elderly couple who speak very little English but they go about giving us the run down. The apartment is tiny compared to what we have had in previous locations but it’s neat and tidy and has everything we need. We drop our stuff and head out and have a look around and because we are only 30m from the Trevi Fountain we thought we’d start there. It was hard to see the Trevi Fountain over the 51,345 people (I counted them) so we decide we will leave that for a week day. We buy some groceries at the supermarket just around the corner and drop them back at the apartment and we head out for another wander and look for a place to have some dinner. We find ourselves at Campo de Fiori and pick a restaurant. The food was rubbish but it was a good night and when we were done we made our way back via the Pantheon for a quick look (that thing is awesome) before heading back to the apartment and into the sack.

Advice to the homeless beggar:

We are walking along a cobbled street when we see a homeless beggar about 10m in front of us. This poor soul is kneeled down with her face almost touching the pavement and with one hand outstretched begging for her life, clearly doing it tough and in obvious anguish........or is she???!!! Just as we approach we hear this sound “ring dingaling, dingaling, dingaling”. It’s an almost Dukes of Hazard like sound. The poor homeless beggar with her other hand slowly reaches into her dress and turns her head inwards slightly so she can discretely check who it is that’s ringing her on her smart phone!!!!! Maybe whack that on silent hey love.......