April 2-3

We packed up Sunday morning, walked one last time to Rialto Bridge, and took one last boat to the train station for our train to Bologna, with a long-researched plan for Dan and Noah to visit the Lamborghini museum 20 miles from Bologna. Being a Sunday and a holiday (Palm Sunday), we knew buses weren’t running, so the plan was to take a train to a town 3 miles away from the museum and figure out the last 3 miles once we got there.

Unfortunately (and fortunately!) we missed the regional train in Bologna, which forced us to catch a long taxi in Bologna. Tammy stayed behind to explore Bologna on a rainy day. The “fortunately” part is because we learned that the rain and the road from the town to the museum would have made our first plan extremely bad. The taxi there and back was expensive but saved us from having our day ruined.

Noah loved the Lamborghini museum, two floors of about 20 cars, and he did a multi screen driving simulation. After taxi’ing to Bologna and meeting Tammy for lunch at McDonalds, we wandered around Bologna in a light rain for a couple hours before making our way back to Bologna station for our train to Rome. Tammy bought a cute hardcover Pinocchio book in Italian near the station, keeping up a tradition from our Europe trips. I’m We arrived in Rome pretty exhausted, checked into a great hotel room that was perfect for us, got a couple snacks and went to bed.

Monday was our Rome day, and we walked at least 10 miles around the city in absolutely perfect weather – Trevi fountain, Spanish steps, the Pantheon, via del Corso, and lots in between. We also walked to the Vatican and saw St. Peter’s Basilica but decided not to wait in the long line on such a beautiful day. The weather was so nice that Noah and Dan switched to short sleeve shirts in the afternoon!

A fun highlight of the day was eating dinner twice at the same Italian restaurant near Spanish steps. First Noah and I had dinners while Tammy snacked, then we went back after stopping at the hotel and Tammy ate dinner there! The waitstaff was incredibly kind, and we ate outside both times. They seemed genuinely happy that we came back to the restaurant. Another highlight was Noah getting new shoes at a Nike store on via del Corso, after we visited many shoe stores during the trip.