Our London adventure was wrapping up with one of the most surreal events we could ever imagine.   Living in the Bible Belt, we’re used to some pretty rigid alcohol laws…which just causes a line out the door of every liquor store and brunch spot at 12:25pm each Sunday to let the mimosas flow.  Our friends across the pond just laugh at the idea of regulation and toast our naive ways with another pint.   And even with that drastic difference in mind, we were completely not prepared for what was in store for us.

We planned to meet up with my cousin who lives in England for a tame night-a few drinks, some Thai food, home before the Tube stops running to pretend we’re responsible adults…and then we heard about Alcoholic Architecture.  

It is a pop up bar in an old monastery with crafted cocktails based on brews and liqueur that the monks once brewed…but that wasn’t the main event.  The insane geniuses behind this bar concept had first figured out how to vaporize Gin and Tonic…and then send it back into the bar with 145% humidity so you were quite literally drinking in a haze of G&T.  A haze so thick we couldn’t see the walls or each other in front of our faces.  

It was ridiculous.   You are only allowed inside for one hour and told to breathe normally because the more you inhale the more you “drink”…Yup, the G&T was fully power and seeping into our blood stream from the mist…and apparently into our eyeballs (weird!)  Can you imagine something like this EVER being allowed in the States?

The Italy laundry situation turned into the Monaco laundry situation which turned into our unfortunate realization that my husband’s favorite shirt was simply beyond any repair of that orange Sahara sand.   We decided to hang on to the colorful guy until after our Egypt jaunt and then let it die a suitable death in the desert that destroyed it…

Cue London and us quite literally wandering around aimlessly our first day in town.   We took the Tube and popped out at a station in time to see Big Ben chime it’s happy song.  We strolled past all the sites, stopping once as a motorcade of police escorted a single black Range Rover through town (it was totally a Prince in there, you can’t tell me otherwise…)  I grabbed a cup of tea to go as we passed through some lovely park on the way to Buckingham Palace (and my husband stole a sip proclaiming it some of the best tea he ever had…he still doesn’t get why this was…)

It was a quaint and peaceful London afternoon…and then as we turned a corner and I peered into the window display of a men’s shop, I remembered that the maker of the favorite shirt is a British company and we actually ordered it online from London…and by some quirk of fate, that window I was looking into happened to be Chuck T!  (or Charles Tyrwhitt if you want to be all formal like those Brits love so much…)

We laughingly stepped inside and went on a hunt for the threads…and as the sweet boy listened to our sob tale and found the shirt for us, he was happy to inform us they were also having a ridiculous sale if we bought 4 shirts so would I like to pick out a few more and they’d have them shipped in for us free?!   Don’t mind if I do, sir…

And the irony of the situation isn’t lost on me, I realize I’ve been in Rome and Paris and London and the only shopping to get done is for my husband, but we have much more of Europe left to even things out…and if that fails, I can always have “trouble” with the laundry in Asia, I hear Hong Kong does some great custom made items!  

In America, fall is for college sports.   We live in the South, so we’re no strangers to the tailgating culture of Saturday football and while it isn’t our go-to activity (there’s a reason this trip is barely overlapping with college basketball season…), we did start to feel the need to have a little bit of sport in our lives.  When in Europe, that means soccer (aka the “fake” football).   Luckily for us, Paris Saint Germain was just a quick Metro ride away and happened to be playing the Swedish team Malmo while we were in town.  According to our only friend who watches soccer when my husband floated the idea by him over G-chat the night before, “Fuck! I forgot about Champions league!!  Yes go!! Paris Saint Germain is one of the best teams in the world!”  So that settled it, we needed to buy tickets.

Let me rewind for a second and say that the last soccer game I attended was probably in 1992 when my sisters played for the rec league in North Texas.   The Shooting Stars were alright, but they were also 9 year old girls who spent half the game making flower chains in the goalie box.   Needless to say, I was unsure of what to expect here! [Ed. note: Never been to a soccer game in my life.]

We bought the cheap seats…and were delighted to learn those actually meant we bought the hoodlum seats.   We were 6 rows off the field, just behind the goal, and immersed in the most passionate fans I’ve ever encountered.   They had songs and chants and 3 large bass drums brought in by the fans.  Not to mention, we were 5 seats away from the Malmo section. That’s right, in European pro soccer, the fans are so…passionate…that the visiting team fans are only allowed in one small corner section.  And this section is guarded on every side by no less than 20 cops in full riot gear…which they use at will during the game.   They also separate the visitor section from our hoodlum section by a full plexiglass wall and a net as high as the entire stadium.   And the section has an added layer of stadium security guards. Plus, they police barricade the area outside the stadium for 10 blocks in any directions so you may only enter at your specific gate and the visitor section has their own entire gate area secluded from anyone else.  [Ed. note: Concessions and bathrooms are also segregated by section. We were only granted access to one concession stand and one big bathroom for our hooligan section. The Swedes had their own bathrooms and food stand.]

I’ve been to LSU-Bama football games, surely this level of hate and drunken fans cannot be worse than Southern frat boys, right?  Apparently so.   The fans for either team spent at least half the game watching each other instead of the field and one of our neighbors took it upon himself each time Malmo starting singing a team song to “conduct” them…using both of his middle fingers.   The kicker came at half time when one of the Swedes used the distraction of the riot police charging at his fellow seat mates to light a PSG scarf on fire and wave it about the stadium….

Neither of us actually know the rules of soccer…or French.   But we decided VERY quickly that we were going to do whatever it took to stay on the good sides of our neighbor fans and waved our hands and chanted and sang whenever the PSG fans did as well.   (I think they were singing “Old MacDonald” at one point, but changed the words to something French and the E-I-E-I-O to Ole Ole Ole!)  We were thrilled when the home team won 2-0…and we booked it out of there immediately to flee any reciprocation from the angry losing team, who were still chanting away as time expired…

Paris, the city of love, the city of lights, the city of stairs…so many damn stairs!

The rain had finally calmed down for at least a day and we knew we needed to take advantage of this chance to roam and be tourists…but as we set out first to see the Louvre bright and early, I had no idea what a trek was actually in store for me!

The Louvre was quiet at opening time…we popped in the “Secret Entrance” (aka, not under the giant glass pyramid that everyone uses) and were inside in seconds.   We had already decided months ago we would skip the Mona Lisa because neither of us had the desire to wait an hour to be pushed into a room and view a painting smaller than our coffee table book when the building was literally covered in masterpieces.   But then we went up a flight of stairs and around a corner and there she was, almost lonely.   Honestly, we strode right up to her and took a selfie (sorrynotsorry), laughed at our good luck and then reevaluated our entire plan for the day.   With an unknown amount of time in a near private museum, we decided to rush around to see the “highlights” before the crowds and tour groups overwhelmed them and then start over slowly visiting the exhibits we actually wanted to see.

The problem with this plan is large sections of the Louvre are under construction, or restoration, so in order to get from point A to point B, it often involves going down 2 flights of stairs and then up 3!  All. Morning. Long.   By the time we had seen all there was to see at the museum (or rather, seen all we could see before everything just started to run together into categories of “old and pretty”), we had easily climbed and hiked a couple miles…and it was still before noon!  We exited into the beautiful gardens and knew we had to take advantage of this dry, sunny day for as long as it lasted and began another long trek to the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées…but before we got out of the gardens, we realized that was really far away and the wind was arctic-cold and bellowing about, and so diverted our trek to the Metro to take us to the stop by the Arc instead…

At the Arc, my husband convinced me that the only option was to climb the 284 stairs…at this point of the day I was cursing him, but later that would seem like a tiny blip in my climbing repertoire.   Up top, we circled to see the 12 roads spoking off of the circle and the beautiful tree lined city in front of us.   Compared to Rome, Paris surprised us with the amount of green space and trees everywhere.   For 2 very old cities, they are so amazingly different as well!

At this point, it was clearly lunchtime and so we found a little cafe with a view of the Arc.   We were enjoying a little wine and had just cut into our meals when the dreaded rain kicked up again…with a vengeance!   We were seated inside a covered sidewalk area, but the wind whipped against the glass walls and slammed stemware into the windows.   Patrons ran inside and we looked at each other for a minute with a shrug, it would calm down, and we were hungry!  But it didn’t calm down, and suddenly a waiter came up to us and the one other young couple who had held out and grabbed for our plates saying “Okay, go now!”   What was I to do?  I poured the rest of the wine into our 2 glasses, picked them up with my purse, and fled to the restaurant!

After the excitement of lunch finally died down, along with the flash storm, we decided we didn’t want to retreat to the apartment quite yet and pressed our luck with the weather (it was sunny again!) once more to go see the Eiffel Tower up close and personal.  We had pre-booked tickets to the top (third floor) on our last night in Paris, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t sit below it and take some daylight pictures while the sun was out, right?

Oh how wrong.   I should know now after so many years with my husband that this would never be enough.   Once there, he started talking about going up.   The elevator tickets were sold out far in advance, he knew that….but he saw people on the stairs.   (Damn those people…)  So we bought stairs tickets…and climbed 704 more stairs to see the view we already paid to see in 2 more days….and my ridiculous husband had the audacity to actually run up the damn things!

[Ed. note: I like tall things, and I like going to the top of tall things. It’s fun to take stairs when they’re available, because you get to see neat things along the way. I think my wife and I have very different definitions of fun though. Her face when I told her we were going to climb the stairs to the top of Notre Dame the next day…]

The romantic notion of Paris in the springtime was floating through my head as we arrived in the city.  Unfortunately, we are in Paris in September.   Cold, wet, dreary September.   And the forecast for the entire week we are visiting is more of the same: rain, wind, and 50 degree temperatures.   I’m a fairly adaptable traveler….and with 88 days on the road, we hadn’t expected all of them to be sunshine and roses, so we had packed expensive rain gear and prepared ourselves for some downtime waiting out storms….just not in Paris.   Honestly, everything I researched and planned for Paris involved wandering adorable French markets to buy a baguette, wine, cheese, etc, and settling into one of the “11 Hidden Picnic Spots” to read and glance up at the Eiffel Tower each day…

Instead, we dumped our luggage into our apartment with the most perfect little balcony and bistro table and watched the rain pour outside.   It was time to create a Plan B fast or our week in Paris would quickly become dinners at the Irish pub below us and cheap bottles of wine on the lumpy Ikea couch day after day…And this is how we ended up at the Musée des Arts Forains!  (It sounds so romantic, doesn’t it?  It wasn’t…unless you get really excited by opera singing wax figures…)

We needed an indoor activity and months ago I had stumbled across an unusual museum that seemed at least worthy of a photo-op, so we booked the tour for Sunday afternoon and didn’t worry too much about what we were about to embark on…which was a 2 hour walking tour of a private collection of 19th century carnival games, rides, and general paraphernalia from a private collector housed in a large warehouse in Paris…conducted entirely in French.  (In hindsight, we should have notified someone of where we were going…)

The tour guide was…strange.  He broke into Italian songs without warning at least 5 times in our 2 hours together…or perhaps there was warning, but again, the entire tour was conducted in French so we had no idea what was going on. [Ed. note: every once in a while he’d call over the Americans and say something in heavily accented English like “this is from 1896, and is XYZ. This is what I will say in French.” And then he would talk for 5-10 minutes in French. I think we missed out on some details.]  We were lead through large rooms dimly lit with mannequins wearing Carnival masks and feather dresses dangling from the rafters.   There were flashing lights and old fashion organs playing as we passed by.  And while we didn’t understand a thing that they said around us, we did understand the basic rules of 1890’s Fairground games and got the chance to play the old fashion skee-ball to race horses!   We didn’t win, but luckily didn’t come in 2nd place either. From a translation offered, the 2nd place finisher had to buy drinks for everyone else!

Playing games seemed harmless enough, but in the next room, they actually expected us to ride the carousel!  Now, in theory, carousels are harmless, slow moving, no loops, or turns or anything requiring a seatbelt even…but when the mechanics were built more than 100 years ago, I was unsure of how safe this might actually be.   Always the adventurer (aka fueled by the half bottle of wine we shared at lunch…), I pulled my husband on deck to stand beside my horse and catch me if the thing suddenly fell apart and enjoyed the ride!

The final room of the tour is the one that gave us both a little WTF moment.   Honestly, we spent a few minutes discussing how or if they even had insurance for this madness.   And in my shock, I failed to take a video of what was happening, so you’ll just have to try to picture this.   It was another carousel…powered by bicycle pedals…that each of the 20-ish adults on the ride were pedaling themselves.  So when the guide rang a bell, we all started pedaling as hard as we could and the ride began to make circles, faster and faster as we all were leaning every so slightly into the right with the motion.   In theory, we could go 60 km per hour.  That’s faster than you’re allowed to drive on the 4 lane major road I drive to work each day.   And as we whirled around and around, my pant leg got caught in the 1890’s pedal and my foot was whipped clear off it’s spot!   Unsure of what to do here, I shrieked (because some sounds transcend the language barrier) and pulled both feet up out of the path of the moving track and held on for dear life until this terrible life plan came to an end!

And as we scurried our way out of the fairgrounds, the guide was so kind to tell us in English that there’s a sister carousel to this one in New York we could go visit one day…maybe next trip?

Monaco, the tiny land of fast cars, flashy royals, and obscene wealth.  Obviously, the top destination spot for travelers with oversized backpacks and not much else to their name.   Yea…we didn’t think so either.   But we decided not to let the less desirable luggage stop us from a detour on our way to Paris!  We knew we had to have one night in this luxurious spot to see what all the fuss was about…but when our schedules lined up so we were there during the annual yacht show, we actually got a lot more glam than even we bargained for!

We trudged off the train and went down down down the stairs–the station was basically blasted inside the mountain side and we had to make our way out to the coast before we could get our bearings and some GPS signal.  As we rounded the corner, the mega yachts glistened along the shore, waiting for their owners to appear and use the 10 person hot tub on deck or one of the 3 levels of sun loungers and couches.  We were already getting a few looks from the passengers of the Ferraris and Audi R8’s zooming by along the bend…oh how I wanted to get into a hotel and ditch this luggage smudged with Sahara dirt!

The desk clerk kept an unreadable face as we plopped our luggage in front of reception to check in.   She didn’t even flinch when we requested one hour laundry and pressing for my husband’s (only) button down.   Dinner reservations were at 8, a jacket was required, and the Moroccan desert’s vivid sand had colored it beyond my repair, even after 2 rounds in the sketchy Italian washing machine!  Unfortunately, to meet that deadline, we had to unpack his ENTIRE backpack in the middle of their lobby to hand over the shirt right that instant…yup, we were the guests they had always dreaded for sure.

We had a few hours to kill before we could “glam up” for our casino dinner, so we went for a walk.   The winding roads and sharp hills were beautiful and had my husband lusting for the chance to drive…something I had already looking into and unfortunately the “driving experiences” in this country were just a tease…they would pick you up in Monaco but instead of letting you try out the famous hairpin turns, they drove you across the border to France before you got behind the wheel of the Ferrari or other super car.

Instead we walked down to the beach and sat eating ice cream (which is a total let down after a week of constant gelato sadly…) and feasting our eyes on elderly Europeans in speedos…Exactly what I expected on the French Riviera honestly. (And I’ll save you any pictures of this particular sight, you’re welcome.)

When it was time for dinner, we took the (still a little orange…) shirt back from a confused housekeeper and hoped that our struggles to look presentable paid off…and as we stepped into the casino lobby surrounded by women in full length gowns and men in white tuxedos, we just shrugged and laughed–the sad realization of backpacking life was that this fancy night out was probably one of our only ones for the next 3 months.

We got inside with just enough time for a little blackjack before dinner.  We love going to Vegas and although I tend to scope out the $5 a hand tables, we were prepared for the stakes to be a little higher here.   What we didn’t expect was for the world famous Monte Carlo Casino to only have 3 tables…total.   Yup, 2 blackjack tables and 1 roulette was the entire room of the live casino action.  It was also the most eerily quiet casino I had ever entered.   There was an entire adjacent room of slot machines, but not a single chime or song came out of those…and not a single player was yelling with joy, but that’s possibly just that no one was winning!  We laid out €100 and figured we could kill an hour here…and then checked the minimum table bet.   Nope, we had 4 hands possible, so we were hoping for a good deal.

Bust.

Bust.

Dealer 21.

Things weren’t looking so hot.  Maybe we could just have a drink before dinner instead to save ourselves the embarrassment?

Thankfully, the next couple rounds went back in our favor and we got back to even.  (Ed. note:  Gotta know when to walk away). We decided that might be the best we could hope for and walked away from blackjack…but no casino trip would be complete without my husbands roulette tradition.  Whenever we are in Vegas, he has to drop some money on Red as we pass a spinning roulette wheel.   It used to be $100 I think just because he felt that made him sound very James Bond.  [Ed. note: hmph.]  Thankfully, in the most 007 casino we had found, he realized the odds weren’t in our favor and instead just dropped one of those €25 chips down…and we won!   It was definitely time to call it a night here because we never expected to say we actually won money at the Monte Carlo Casino and didn’t want to push our luck!

It was our last day in Italy (for a few weeks…)….we had accomplished our mission of “roaming” and seeing old stuff.   We decided to make this a trail run of our Eurail Pass and take a day trip on the train.   We arrived bright and early at the station and bought a seat reservation to Naples.    Our plan was to get off at that station and find someone to take us to Pompeii.   How hard could it be, we thought?  Remember that resolution we made day 1 in Rome to plan ahead and know where we’re going before we leave AC and wifi?  Yea, that lasted 2 days obviously….

In Naples, we were surprised to find, once again, that everything was in Italian.   Yes, we are those stupid Americans, but I suppose the stereotype is there for a reason….but this time we were smarter about it and found a tourism office in the station.   The nice lady at the desk handed us a time table for the local train (separate from the Naples metro, which was also at this station), circled the start and stop stations for us, and pointed us downstairs to the ticket booth with encouragement “just down and its on the left!”

We were so proud, we could take the train from Naples to get us to Pompeii—we were great travelers after all and didn’t need some $100 each private tours booked online to get around!  And then we spent 5 minutes trying to buy tickets at a machine for the wrong type of train (turns out it was for their subway) until the annoyed Italian lady waiting behind us waved her hands and pointed us to a ticket desk down on the left….it’s a work in progress I suppose!

Once in Pompeii, we were immediately approached off the train with the promise of a 2 hour walking tour of Pompeii for only 12 Euro…it sounded like a bargain and we knew absolutely nothing about the place beside a mountain blew up there once and covered everything, so we accepted….and were given little stickers to wear and told to follow the lady with the bright pink umbrella…Yup, we had quickly become the people we despise as we travel, the slow moving ones who stop in the middle of small hallways and block everyone else’s way as they are told little stories of a room or a picture for 5 minutes at a time.

Truthfully, I’m glad we took the tour.  (ed. note: So am I.) We would not have known to check out the wheel ruts still in the paved roads from 700 years of the local people continuously using those stoned-paved paths.   We would have missed the knowledge that this town used white rocks inset among the large paver stones as natural streetlights, reflecting the moonlight on the main path from the port gate into the city.  And we would never have known to keep looking down on the road for the phallic pictures, which they used as arrows to point out the route to the red light district!

And in the red light district came my absolute favorite part of being on this Pompeii tour…courtesy of a middle aged Asian man and his iPad as a camera.   As we peered into the small rooms for each lady, our guide explained that the frescas painted above each door represented the position that was the specialty of that woman.  There were some basic ones and some that looked a little more “50 Shades of Gray”…but as the Asian man peered through his iPad screen and zoomed in on one, he proudly proclaimed “That one is Doggie Style!”  Yes, yes it was…

Shortly before we left the States, we were hanging out at the local Irish pub with my parents (you know, our typical Sunday morning…) and ran into a family friend.   He had just returned from a week in Rome so as I did with everyone I’ve met lately who was traveling somewhere we were to go on this adventure, I asked him what the best thing was there.   He didn’t hesitate when telling us we had to go find the aqueducts. My husband lit up.   We had mentioned finding some aqueducts early on in planning and then promptly forgot about it, lost in a sea of “oh, we should do that” thoughts, but now it was back in our mind and we were going to do it!

Unfortunately, the aqueducts are not really that near to the city.   They involved us taking a bus…and a metro train….and a walk.   This might not sound like a big deal, but we live in one of those big cities where the public transportation doesn’t actually go anywhere.   It’s a car city and so you just drive.   Especially to get miles outside of the city!   But when in Rome and all that jazz, we spent sometime with our AC and wifi (finally!!) and figured out how to make this adventure work!

My research on the actual aqueduct park was limited, but there was a mention of some word that roughly translated to park ranger, so I assumed this would be similar to the national parks back home and have placards and a gift shop and some lovely maintained trails to follow….but it was just a park.   

No, honestly, there were people walking their dogs…going for a jog…taking a nap on a blanket because the August heat had finally broken in mid-September and it was actually a beautiful day to be outside.   The only difference between this place and your normal neighborhood park was that instead of looking up at massive oak trees, most of the way you were staring up at 2,000 year old structures that provided indoor plumbing and water pressure to the Roman Empire.   It was just so surreal and at the same time completely normal for Rome as we’d seen it.   People were so used to all the old and beautiful history around them, they seemed to no longer notice it because it was just part of where they lived.   I can’t imagine every getting to that stage, but here it is just all they know. 

Traveling is wonderful….but beyond going “home” to Ireland, I’ve never been anywhere longer than 2 weeks thanks to the limitations of American vacation policies.   This means I’ve also never had the need to do laundry while traveling as you can easily pack enough for 2 weeks or pay a little bit for the hotel to wash what you need to get home.   Cue 3 months of travel in a ton of countries and several climate changes….with only a backpack.   This ridiculous life plan lead me to filter all Airbnb searches to include a washer and now I’m in Rome trying to figure out how to get the dust of the Sahara desert out of my favorite white shirt…

The machine is…unusual.   It’s a top loader, and we have those back home, so it can’t be too hard, but once you open the lip there is a metal cylinder…that locks.  After spinning it around a few times and pushing and pulling, the level clicks and I’m able to open the drum.   Clothes go inside, drum gets locked again, simple enough.   But to be safe, I start with His clothes in case I can’t unlock that drum ever again…

Now the detergent…I have powder, which I’ve never used before.   And there are 2 openings…One has some powder residue and the other is simply a deep black hole into the machine.   I put a dash into the first slot.   Then a dash more…the Sahara was REALLY dusty… and then a dash into the second hole, because you can’t be too careful on these things!

The last hurdle is to turn the machine on.   Luckily, there are typed instructions with numbers.  Unluckily, they are all in Italian… Our phone does basic translations with the Google Translate app…but they leave a lot to be desired when the first wash option is “Whites Stringy”…any guesses what that could mean?  I select a number in the middle of the spectrum and hope for the best!

As the machine shakes and clicks, I close the kitchen door and go to bed with dreams of new European clothes in my head….maybe laundry in Asia will be more straight forward….

Somehow, during our 5 days in Rome we went to Vatican City 4 times.   While he has been dubbed the cool Pope, we actually only intended to see his world twice.   But on our first real night in Rome we saw the lights from across the river and decided to just walk a little to work off our gelato…and it was stunning at night.   Nearly empty and free of the men hawking selfie sticks to everyone EXCEPT the people actually taking selfies (seriously, shouldn’t those be the folks you target in your marketing since they have proved they actually take selfies?  5 days, not one of the vendors ever approached a person taking a selfie….), St. Peter’s Square (is it still a square when it is distinctly oval shaped?) was beautiful at night.

On Tuesday, we had prebooked tickets for our Vatican tour.  We go there early in hopes of finding a passport stamp, but they apparently no longer do those, so we settled for buying a few postcards to send out instead…but we didn’t send them then either. 

Inside the Vatican museum, you honestly cannot see everything.   The rooms are crowded with art, statues, fountains, and behind every display are old tapestries clinging to the walls.   Then your eyes travel up the tapestries and you realize every ceiling is painted in an ornate scene.  

By the time you have be pushed and shoved along and up and down stairs to get inside the Sistine Chapel, it almost just runs together with every other room in the building!   But then you find a spot to sit along the wall and soak in your surroundings with the AC and the silence (okay, silence is a stretch….every 3 minutes a guard gets on the microphone and booms SILENCE PLEASE in 6 languages…but it is definitely a little more reverent without the large tour groups talking to their crowd from under their colored umbrella, so it was a retreat) you start to observe just how huge this ceiling is and consider that Michelangelo laid on his back for hours at a time to not just create the scene everyone knows which is in the very center, but 20 other scenes surrounding it upon the ceiling and moving 10 feet down the walls on each side.  It’s magical the effort that went into these buildings and a little sad how lost this level of art and appreciation of it is today.  

Outside the museum, it was time to find the adorably dressed Swiss Guards.   Why, you might wonder?  First, to take a picture, because I find the hilarious even if my husband reminds me they are trained to kill and probably hide large weapons inside those circus tent knickers…but in reality because they held the tickets to see the Pope!   We had learned before we left the States that the Pope does a general audience in the courtyard of St. Peter’s Square every Wednesday morning he is in Rome and since this was the last one before his first ever trip to America, we felt it was our duty to go and bid him “Bon Voyage”!  (ed. note: brownie points for me were obtained by speaking to the guard. They hand out the reserved-via-fax general admission tickets at 3pm. I talked to him at 2:15 and dude had two magic tickets just for me. Saved 45 minutes.)

The audience Wednesday morning was something to experience…and sadly not for the reverent words of Pope Francis as it was all in Italian or Latin and the translations read in at least 7 languages was just the Cliff Notes version.   No, the people watching was divine.   Imagine showing up somewhere around the same time as 7,000 other people…in a country that has a very loose relationship with lines.    We were pushed and we pushed to make our way around the barricades and through the metal detectors before we could get inside the courtyard.   Unfortunately, our metal detector line was held up for a while by 2 brides…in full bridal gear.   I’m talking beaded, ballgown dresses with hoop skirts that set off the metal detector, veils, tiaras, sparkly shoes.   But once they made it through the machine with an all clear, they didn’t allow anything to slow them down. 

It was the Catholic running of the bulls.   Nuns in full habits.   Packs of Priests wearing collars and baseball caps.  A couple of Friar Tuck-esque gentlemen, complete with brown robes.  Elderly Midwesterners on a Church Pilgrimage with matching t-shirts.   Everyone sprinted the fastest they were able to into the front of the seats and press their bodies up against the walls.  And as the front area filled, we watched from our prime center aisle seat 20 rows back from the stage and saw the running continue for an hour as people young and old fought for space and packed the Square that was empty and silent just a few days prior.

When the Pope finally appeared, the crowd was deafening.   He rolled out in is Pope-mobile (no bubble for this pope – his Pope-mobile is all open-air) waving and kissing babies.   No, literally kissing babies.   Parents thrust their infants through the crowds and over the fence so that the Pope had no choice but to hold the child, place a kiss upon it’s head, and then hand it back to his security guard…then the guard would walk backwards to find out who to hand this confused child back to as the Pope-mobile had kept rolling on away from the parents.  This continued for 20 minutes as he wound his way up and down each path in the square before he was finally able to ascend the stairs to the stage.  

The audience was…long.   And the strange group of teens next to us kept breaking out in claps and chants.    I’m all for cheering and will shout and holler all day at a basketball game…but something about starting up a boisterous chant of “Papa Francesca!” over and over while said Papa Francesca is trying to offer his wisdom on the purpose of family in the Catholic Church seemed out of place.  My husband seemed to be done at this point.   The morning started early to secure our good seats and the Homily is a great time to take a nap, so he might have shut his eyes for a minute or 10… (ed. note: 100% true. I was sleepy.)

When it was over, we took our leave and fled Vatican City for the day.   With 20,000 people there (7,000 seats, plus standing room filling the entire area) plus more coming to do all the tours, we where thankful we had already seen all we wanted to see there!  And about 2 hours later, we realized in our haste we forgot to write our postcards about our time chilling with the Pope and would have to go back there once more before we left Rome if we wanted to actually mail the blasted things!   Maybe in the next country of Europe we’ll get better at this planning thing…