Taking it Easy in Rome

May 5th--Today we went to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch. We plan to visit every Hard Rock along the way. I have a friend I used to work with that collects the pins. So, we are picking one up for him at every stop. It's actually really fun, and at times we wonder why we aren't collecting them too. Anyway, after lunch we walked to the Spanish Steps. We were inundated by people trying to get us to buy long stem roses. They are all over the place here. They really try to get the kids in on it so we are trying to teach our kids to just ignore them. That's a hard thing to do. We then did some window shopping. We walked down the famous Via del Corso which is a street lined with many shops. We had planned to walk the entire "shopping triangle", but as we came to the end of Via del Corso, it started raining. So, we ducked into a gelateria hoping to ride out the rain. Well, after we finished our gelato, it was still raining and not really letting up. Luckily, it wasn't raining too hard so we made a run for the nearest Metro station and headed back towards the apartment. When we arrived at the apartment's Metro stop, it was still raining so we ran from the station to the apartment. The kids enjoyed the opportunity to "play" in the rain.



May 6th--Today was another take it easy day. We left the apartment about noon to head back to the "shopping triangle" to finish window shopping. We first found a cafe to eat lunch at before doing any shopping. We walked the entire shopping triangle today. After that, we decided to go to Villa Borghese Gardens. This is considered Rome's Central Park. It was very pretty and we got a great view of St. Peter's from the park. After walking around for a little while, we rented a 2 person bike. It was a lot of fun riding around the park and we got many laughs from it.
After Mike and I had had enough of a workout, we turned our bike back in and headed back to the apartment to get ready for MeMom arriving tomorrow.