To Rome and Back

On May 15 we drove to Rome and back. We went to see some old friends who were on part of a Rome-Greece-Turkey-Egypt-Rome tour. It was fun to see them and to be in Rome again. It is easy to forget how shocking it is for new visitors to see ancient Roman ruins on every turn. Our friends were staying at a hotel a couple of blocks from the Colosseum and we wandered around in the area for a short time. I think they had been to Rome before but not for a long time and their prior visit was very short. In any event, it was fun to see how interesting they found the "stuff" everyone in Rome just lives with. We had a nice lunch, talked about old friends and poker and returned in a light rain.

I was interested in the driving statistics. It was a total of 121 miles from our door to their hotel and took exactly 2 hours 15 minutes. That's not too impressive until you consider that it includes driving in Rome. It took about 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to the end of the autostrada inside Rome and another 30 minutes from there to the Colosseum area. The good news about the Roman drive was that it was on a Sunday so the traffic was, by Roman standards, light. Maybe not as bad as many American cities during rush hour but close. We also managed to average 42 mpg which includes some city driving, going through the mountains (while there is a tunnel a little longer than 10,000 meters that everyone refers to as "under Gran Sasso," in fact there is a substantial climb to get to the tunnel) and long stretches at 140 kph (about 85 mph).

Our friends gave us a DVD made and edited by one of them of a get together of a group of former public defenders. We enjoyed watching it when we returned. It's quasi-surrealistic, but very enjoyable, to sit on the Adriatic coast and watch video of the gathering of a group of former colleagues in a park in Ohio. Probably like coming from Ohio to see old Roman stuff, aka ORC, that just sticks out everywhere.