Day 6: Venice to Rome

Today we were up and on the bus by 7:45 for the all day bus ride to Rome… And it was an all day drive to Rome.

We made a couple of rest stops along the way, had lunch at one of the Autogrill truckstop restaurants we’ve seem all over Italy and got to the hotel around 5pm.

This was the one hotel we were a little concerned about – the last person to rate it on TripAdvisor said something to the effect that they “thought they were on the set of a horror movie” and the overall rating for the hotel was quite low. We needn’t have worried. The hotel is definitely off the beaten path (with traffic we’re anywhere from 1 to 2 hours outside of Rome and there’s literally nothing near the hotel as it’s on the grounds of an old villa) but it’s clean, the rooms are decent sized and it’s a nice property. I think the negative reviews are from people who stayed there on their own (ie. not with a group) as this is definitely a group-oriented hotel (there were a couple of other EF tour groups on site as well as a busload of tourists from China while we were there).

At the hotel we dumped our bags and then the kids spent the time before dinner playing cards and hanging out. Dinner tonight was a nice lasagna starter followed by a green salad with meatballs and a custard with chocolate sauce for dessert. This is pretty typical of meals in Italy where you start with a pasta dish and then the second course is some kind of meat (so far it’s been slices of deli ham, beef in tomato sauce and meatballs). It’s a little different from our meals where we often start with salad and then lasagna or spaghetti would be the main course… I can’t say which I prefer. Given how hungry we usually are by dinner time, starting with a nice big plate of pasta is not a bad way to start the meal.

After dinner some of our kids resumed their card game while others went off to have showers or catch up on social media or went to bed early… Tomorrow we’re for Rome at 7:15am and will be in the city until 10pm so it’s going to be a very long day.

There aren’t many pictures from today as most of the day was spent on the bus (and most of us slept on and off for large portions of the trip).