To Rome with Love

Our last glimpse of the Adriatic Sea

We made it safely onto the train, after an easy drop off of the car and two hours of people watching at the railway station. The biggest challenge was standing waiting to board the train when it arrived, not realizing that we actually had to push a button to open the door. I wonder if the train would have pulled away without us, or if someone would have eventually helped us to figure things out had we not moved up to the front of the car and had a steward point it out to us. Regardless, we are on here now.

The sun would soon be setting soon, and the blinds were pulled mostly down on my side of the carriage, but through the far side window I could see mile after mile of olive trees, entwined with the endless stone fences that run among them. We guessed that it must be nearing the harvest time for the olives. The trees are all heavily laden, and every where is the smell of smoke as piles of trashy underbrush have been raked up and lit. It seems that in preparation, the land under and in between the trees has been raked clean, and the scrub burned. Our assumption was that the olives will fall to the ground and be gathered for processing,  and though I'd intended to look into it further the process, as we were intrigued by it, I never did. It would also be interesting to see how big a role the olive industry plays in Italy's economy, as from what we had seen, it must be huge.
Heading north along the coast, it seems that the ground is becoming more fertile and looks to be less stoney and more workable, although the buildings and stone fences remained the same for the time daylight allowed us to observe. 

With a 5 hour train ride ahead of us and the sun will soon set, we settled in for the long ride.  The TrenItalia train we were on didn't have wifi, so the options for killing time were limited.   Luckily there were always books to be read on my Kindle, or the opportunity to grab a bit of shut eye.  We knew it was going to be a whirlwind day the following one, because unfortunately we only had one day to see the sights of Rome.  I always remember my Grandfather saying that it's too bad you can't bank sleep, grabbing a much of it when you can for use when there are things you really want to be doing.  Grandpa was one of the wisest men I ever knew, and I remembered his words as I closed my eyes for a while. 
We made it safely to our hotel around 11pm, tired and ready for a good nights sleep.  The Bettoja Hotel I had booked through Hotels.com was older, the room small, but was all we need for the little time we'd be spending there.
We went to a little restaurant around the corner and had a late dinner of ravioli, and some type of beef  that Cec ended up with when much to his disappointment they were out of salmon. By midnight we were both sleeping in prep for a busy day of touring Rome ahead of us.  

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