The journey ends

By our last day in Rome, we had already seen just about all the major sights we wanted to hit. Our one last sightseeing stop was the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, which houses Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa. (It was featured in Angels & Demons, so I had to see it.)



The rest of the day was spent relaxing and just enjoying Rome. Dave and I liked this Lamborghini we ran across in a shop window:



We also attempted to go on the "Bus 'n' Boat" tour, which is one of those tourist buses that goes around the city and lets you get on and off anywhere, except your ticket also lets you get on a boat that floats down the Tiber. Unfortunately, it was the most disorganized thing we encountered in all of Italy (which is saying a lot): in particular, the bus schedule and the boat schedule had nothing to do with each other, and were not, for instance, arranged to let you easily transfer from one to the other. We ended up narrowly missing the boat.

Then Dave and I wanted to rent motor scooters and drive around Rome, as we had seen many, many other people doing:



We found a rental place and starting getting set up. When the guy realized that we had no experience with the bikes, though, and weren't even used to reading Italian street signs, he told us that if we tried to go out in Rome on a weekday and learn how to use these things, we would kill ourselves. We decided to take his advice and walked around and shopped a bit instead.

For our farewell dinner, Dave selected a Japanese restaurant (what else?), where we learned the Italian words for things like "sushi" and "teriyaki." Here's the family at dinner:



In all, a relaxing way to end our trip.

The trip home was uneventful. (Air France has some of the best airline food I've ever had.) I'm back in Seattle now, settling back in to normal life. It was good to come home. I felt a surprising sense of relief just to be back in a familiar country, where I know how things work and where I can communicate with people with the utmost clarity.

I feel as if I've been away forever, which is perhaps how one should feel after returning from vacation. I haven't even looked at work email yet and probably won't until Sunday night. At the same time, I'm looking forward to going back to work on Monday and feel that I really can return to the job with a renewed energy.

So overall, the trip was a grand success, especially exciting to me by virtue of being my first major trip outside the US. I'm eager to travel more in the future. Maybe next year to Japan....