We flew over Nice. Not by Nice. Not around Nice. We flew directly over Nice.
I peered down at the winding roads descending out of the mountains heading towards the city on the French Riviera imagining that somewhere down there 38 years ago Paul and I were scooting around on mopeds.
The plane was making its descent. The morning sun rose over the Mediterranean.
As we popped our ears, we passed over the northern edge of Corsica.
Fast forward a bit…
Italian customs waved us thru without stamping out passports. We waited a very, very long time for a bus that took us to the train station where the fair and industrious Trudy’s planning began to pay off. She got our Roma passes. She figured out which direction we needed to go on the Metro in order to get to our hotel. She navigated the cobblestone streets as we searched for the hotel.
Although we did a bit of back and forth, and although I was losing much water weight in my cold-airplane-long-sleeved-shirt,
we found the hotel and dropped off our suitcases at the front desk. And we proceeded to search the narrow streets (unsuccessfully at first)
for a place to sit down and relax and eat.
Just a block from the hotel, we found it. Or rather they found us, seeing my sweat-drenched shirt, they pointed to the fans they had on the sidewalks and invited us to sit.
“Can we have breakfast?” Trudy asked.
“Yes!” they said, running back inside to get the breakfast menu, because frankly, it was almost lunch time.
We had arrived in Rome safe and sound.