21/22 Oct 04:

I departed Philadelphia on time at 18:10 EDT on an Airbus A330. US Airways gives you the least legroom of any carrier ­– but there are lots of nonstop flights, and the price was right. Otherwise, it was a routine flight, 7^h30^m from takeoff to touchdown at 08:40 CEDT. I managed to doze for a couple of hours near the end of the flight.

Arriving at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, I cleared customs and collected my baggage in about an hour and a half. I then took the 35-minute train ride to Roma Termini, the central rail station, where my travel instructions recommended taking the Metro to my final destination, the Ergife (air-JEE-feh) Palace Hotel in the northwest quarter of the city. That was when the fun started.

It is about a one-kilometer walk from the Roma Termini to the Metro station, not really that bad of a hike along a broad underground corridor punctuated with slidewalks. I marveled at the lack of foot traffic, especially on a Friday, but was grateful not to have to fight crowds. Upon arriving at the Metro station, still pleasantly bereft of passengers, I encountered a carabiniero guarding the gated and locked entrance to the Metro. He informed me that the Metro workers had decided to strike that day. I asked about alternate transportation in the form of a bus but regrettably, the bus workers were also on strike! The strikers were due to resume their duties at 17:00, but by now it was only 10:30. My best bet seemed to be to try to find a taxi.

Outside the Termini, the piazza was nearly empty – the only sign of activity was a long line of white taxis creeping up to an even longer line of people waiting to get into one. As I considered joining the queue, I was approached several times by free lance drivers looking for passengers, who told me they would take me on the 20 km ride to the Ergife for fares ranging from €70–90 (€1 = 1 Euro = $1.28 at the time of this writing). I later was informed that the usual fare was about €15, but with the strike on it was definitely a seller’s market. I walked across the piazza to a café to have a mineral water while I pondered my options.

After cooling off a little (the day was warm and sunny), I walked back into the Termini and went to the information station. There, I found that I could take a surface train to the San Pietro stop and transfer to a second train going to the Valle Aurelio stop not far from the hotel. The first leg cost me €2, the second €1, and I arrived at the last stop at about 13:00. Disembarking, I exited the station and paused on the street sidewalk to get my bearings. A kindly elderly gentleman informed me of the direction and distance to the hotel, only a “kilometro e medio” (1-½ km) walk from the station, so I set out in the indicated direction, up a gentle rise.

Unfortunately, the addled old geezer’s sense of distance was profoundly warped, as the trek was closer to 5 km, and the first 2 km were up an increasingly steep incline camouflaged from initial view by a chicane bend to the left and back to the right. The early afternoon sun beat a tattoo on my head and shoulders – I had taken off my summer weight tweed jacket earlier and had subsequently doffed my baseball cap so as not to be immediately taken for a tourist. Yeah, right – imagine a guy in blue jeans, T-shirt, and white sneakers plodding up a hill dragging two suitcases behind him.

I break into a monsoon-like sweat at the slightest provocation, so by the time I had gone 500 meters I was drenched. Gamely continuing the routine of putting one foot in front of the other, I kept one salt-blinded eye on the lookout for a street sign advertising Via Aurelia, the street on which the hotel was purported to be located, and I did in fact find myself on that broad avenue after kilometer 3 or so, where I started seeing street numbers in the same millennium as the one I was seeking. Unfortunately, at about kilometer 4.5, I mistook a sign reading “469” for the “619” I actually sought (I think I was suffering from a simultaneous combination of jet lag, heat exhaustion, and dehydration, a deadly combo), and I wound up taking a detour into the wrong convention center, where they told me my goal was “only” 800 m farther down the road. Returning to my forced march, I finally found the correct side street and sobbed with relief and joy as I entered the Ergife lobby at 14:30. I had traveled the first 7000 kilometers in under 8 hours, but it took me some 6 hours after the aircraft tires had kissed the tarmac at the airport to travel the final 20 kilometers.

My usual practice on these overnight transatlantic flights is to take an afternoon nap, rising at sundown for dinner. For me, this seems to effectively reset my internal clock and minimizes jet lag. Accordingly, I stripped down, sluiced down, and flopped down. I slept heavily and dreamlessly until my wife woke me around 18:30 with an invitation to join a dinner outing with her and her colleagues. They had been attending a professional convention all week, and this was the last day of the conference. At 19:30, a group of us numbering about a dozen piled into taxis and took the short ride to the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, a working class village. Our destination was Trattoria di Lucia, a family restaurant said to have great food at reasonable prices. We found it so, at great length, and finally returned to the Ergife about midnight. My afternoon nap did not prevent me from staying up reading until about 02:00, when I finally fell asleep.

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