Sevilla -> Rome

A generally productive day. Did some laundry, some academic reading, worked on some machine learning with the STEM data set and continued to develop my calc three course for the fall.

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This evening, I caught the bus at Plaza de Armas and headed out to the airport for a flight to Rome. Laura, as has almost become our habit, met me on the bus at the Santa Justa stop where she'd walked after her class.

The flight was on time, but it was quite late when we landed in Rome (around midnight):

These two wall posters in the Rome airport are literally the only photos I have from Friday.

We met our van driver in the arrivals area. Turns out we were sharing a ride with another couple. As late as it was, the second couple didn't arrive for another half-hour or so. Once there, we hot-footed it to the van and the drive took us into the center of Rome (about a 40 min trip). The roads are very rough in Rome! Seemed like we bumped and rattled most of the way there. The other couple got dropped off first, then we wormed our way deeper into the city to our lodging, the Hotel Garda.

The Hotel Garda is a low-key affair occupying the 4th floor of a large apartment building. We rolled up there at about 1am and worried about getting in. We rang the bell for the Hotel Garda and after a mildly alarming wait, were buzzed into the building. We followed our noses and hit a second locked gate with a second intercom panel. We rang the bell and were buzzed in again to a small vestibule with a single elevator shaft. In whats was seeming to be some kind of video game adventure, we pressed the elevator button and guessed the floor number (4) and headed up. Stepping off the elevator, we were relieved to see a hotel reception area and a clerk (achievement unlocked). The clerk registered us and we headed to our room around 1:30am.

The real challenge with this arrival time was that our Vatican tour started at 8am the next morning. We hustled through our evening ablutions and hit the sack.