Monday started off rocky for me…I woke up at 3:30 in the morning with a horrible stomachache. In hindsight it probably wasn’t the WORST, but I have a low pain tolerance and hardly ever get sick. Knock on wood. Anyway, I couldn’t fall back asleep and eventually had to mosey on into the bathroom for quick access to the toilet in the case I threw up, for lack of more acceptable wording. I ended up watching The Parent Trap on my laptop (yes, I have it on my laptop…best purchase ever) until about 5 or so, then decided to lay back down. One of my roommates got up shortly after to get ready in the bathroom, and sure enough that’s when it hit…sorry again for pushing you out of the bathroom, Jennine, but hey I felt a lot better after that! I hate to blame it on the pesto pasta from the night before, but I don’t know what else it could have been. So with the sickness aside, I went to eat some breakfast and trek on down to the bus after getting all of my bags out of our room. After about a two hour nap on the bus, I felt much better and was ready to take on Rome. We got to our hotel around 10:30ish, so we had pretty much the whole day to do whatever we wanted. We took the bus to the main part of Rome with a game plan to see three main things: the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, and the Colosseum. Other than that, we stopped to see whatever we wanted as time allowed. Having this be my second trip to Rome, I was excited to see what all I remembered and to revisit places I had been when I visited in high school. We grabbed a quick lunch once we got to the main area before setting out on our day. Unfortunately we got to the Pantheon right as it was closing, but it was still an awesome view peaking in from outside. From there, we maneuvered our way through streets and crowds to the Trevi Fountain where I threw in my second coin! After snapping some necessary tourist pictures, we were off to the Colosseum! I didn’t go in this time around, but I still enjoyed just admiring it from the outside. We sat around outside watching the bootleg purse and sunglass guys get chased by the police while a few of our friends went in, then went to get gelato one last time once our little group was back together. We had successfully seen everything that we wanted to, so from there we just wandered around for a bit before hopping on a bus back to our hotel. Overall, I truly enjoyed Rome again. I wish we had had two days to visit as I would have loved to visit Vatican City again, but I guess that gives me a reason to go back and visit for a third time…
Dinner was at the hotel, and wasn’t anything to talk about. We all moved to the lobby (hello, wifi) to hang out and avoid going to bed, because that meant that the trip would be over. Tears were shed, cheesy instagrams were made, and some goodbyes were said. Seriously, all the girls on my trip were the coolest. We eventually trickled off to bed, as we had yet another early wake up time of 5:30 am!!