Rome, Day 1 - Getting there

Rome ended up being a much more expensive endeavor than I had expected. I keep hearing people talk about how cheap it is to get around Europe. It's not. Either that, or I chose the one expensive place to visit. The train would have taken like 10 hours and would have been horribly expensive. Since we don't have a physical US address, we can't get Eurail passes, and even if we could, we would have to get 3 country passes, since you have to get through either Switzerland or Austria to get to Italy.

Over the Alps

So anyway, flying it was. I looked at regular flights, and they were all $400-$600 per person. I looked at RyanAir, a discount airline, and they could get us there for under $1000 round trip. Awesome. I had heard some not-so-nice things about Ryanair, but it seemed worth it to pay less than half the price. So, they charge you for everything. Like on regular travel sites, they charge you for tickets, and they charge you for "taxes and fees," which are more than the actual tickets. Also like many other airlines, they charge for checked bags (25€ for each one), but you have to know how many bags you'll have before you check in - no just bringing bags to the airport willy-nilly. But on Ryanair, they then charge you for web check-in (though there is no other choice), and for using a credit card other than theirs. They have a first-come first-served seating policy, so you can also pay for "priority seating." Their baggage policy is such that your carry-on bags can be no more than 55cm x40cm x20cm, and weigh no more than 10 kilos. And they check. If your bag is too big, they reserve the right to not let you on the plane. And no "personal item," like you can have on other airlines. Your camera, your purse, your everything must fit in your carry-on. Nice, huh? So, we were very careful to make sure we were under those requirements. We each packed as much as we could of our own stuff in our carry-ons, and then we had one bag to check between us. It was mostly filled with food, since we were staying in an apartment. We brought lots of granola bars, pop tarts, oatmeal, etc.

One of the other things that sucks about RyanAir is the time. We could get a plane at 6:10am or at 8:30pm. We went for 6:10am, which means we had to get up at 3am to get out of the house by 3:30 to get to the airport by 4:30. It was painful. But, we got there in good time, we were able to park close, and we walked right up to the check-in with nobody else around. We sailed through security and sat down right at the gate. And we waited. As we had been waiting, we noticed people standing in another line. They were coming away with stickers on their bags. Hmmm... so Mom & Max took our bags over there, and sure enough that was another line that had to be stood in. A girl was checking the carry-ons to see if they were underweight, and if they looked big, checking their dimensions. Good thing we had checked! We ended up being almost the first people in line, so we had no problem getting seats by each other.

The plane is so cheap that the seats don't move, they have no seat-back pocket, the safety instructions are just a picture on the seat-back in front of you, and they have ads all over the luggage compartments.

It went well, and I thought the stress was definitely worth the savings.

Our apartment was just off Piazza Navona, so we figured it wouldn't be hard to find a bus there from the airport. It was. We asked the guy at the desk that said "bus, train, and metro tickets", and he said that the best way was to take a bus to the metro station, take the metro to Barbarini,  and then walk from there. OK. We landed at 7:55, and we were supposed to meet the apartment lady at 9. The bus to the metro took forever. The metro took forever. Barbarini is on the other side of the city from Navona. We didn't get to the apartment until after 10. But, we got there, and that was the important part.

Emma says - I hate RyanAir! If I ever have to fly them again, I will leave. Even if I'm going to Magical Candyland, I will not take RyanAir.