Day 8 & 9: St. Peter's Basilica

On Tuesday Logan and I headed downtown again to go to St. Peter's Square. This was the one day my parents were busy all day so we were on our own. Luckily we knew our way around! We walked around the square, walked all around inside the enormous basilica and climbed a what felt like a million stairs to the top of the dome. About 2/3 the way up you go inside the dome and can see down into the church, that was the one part that made me weak in the knees. I had to get out of there quick. Luckily being outside and looking around didn't make me feel sick at all. It was really cool.

Pieta by Michelangelo 

I've been here before but I was still amazed at how incredibly enormous

this building is, it's quite a site to see 

 all the "paintings" in the church are actually mosaics, I knew this one was but the more we looked around we started noticing all of them were mosaics, incredible.

After looking around we got in line to go to the top, I was pretty anxious!

 There is a man standing right in the middle near the dark circle, see how small he is?? I got this picture then had to get out of there, we were really high up.

this was taken on our way back down, we were all the way at the top (you can see it way up there), and at this point my legs were pretty weak and I was a little disoriented from all the spiral stair cases 

St. Peter's Square from above 

Looking down into Vatican City 

and of course...the Swiss guard :)

The next day we didn't do too much. We hung out most of the day and then went to the Apple store to get my mom's computer fixed. It was surprising to me, not sure why, that the Apple store in Rome was exactly the same as one in the US. It was kinda like a little piece of home in Rome :)

next post...Florence!

Day 7: Downtown Rome...again

On Monday we had the opportunity to go on the Rome Temple Site, we were pretty lucky as you have to have a pass to even go past the gates. My dad drove us around the site and showed us the model then we helped my parents with some computer stuff.

Technically I'm not supposed to post any pictures of the site so I'll just show you the model of the site. They are still just pouring concrete so the pictures aren't that exciting anyway.

 there are 4 main buildings- The Temple in front, patron housing to the left, a visitor's center at the top and a stake center to the right. They call is a mini temple square :) It's gonna be pretty amazing!

After meeting all the people that work on the site we headed home for some dinner. After dinner we headed downtown again to see some more sites. My parents and I agree the Trevi Fountain and Pantheon are more impressive at night. 

The metro stop we got off at was way underground and the escalator ride up was super long. We didn't look back down til we were almost toward the top and it kinda made me sick. It was soooo far down!

It was pretty crowded but we made our way to the front and got a decent picture. I just LOVE the Trevi Fountain and I especially love it at night. 

The Pantheon is such an impressive building. As we came around the corner to see it Logan was like "what? where did this come from?" It's just not really expected to be right in the middle of the city. Pretty crazy it was built in 126AD...now that's an old building!

And while we were downtown we stopped by the Spanish Steps as well. Not my favorite site to see, it's a little boring to me. But we figured Logan needed to see it all :)

Day 6: Church & Rocca di Papa

On Sunday we went to church in the morning and then went for an afternoon drive. It was such a great experience going to church with my parents, I was glad we were there for 2 Sundays. The members were so humble and welcoming. They couldn't be more excited for the temple to be built. In fact I don't think there was a single lesson or talk that didn't mention the temple and how blessed they are to have a temple built in Italy. It made me really think about my own temple attendance, I need to step it up. I am so grateful for all the members there, they were such a great example to me.

There are quite a few Americans in the ward so one of the missionaries translated and we just had to wear headphones. Logan opted to try to just figure out what they were saying...he got the general idea of all the talks. This is a picture of where the ward meets right now. There is a new stake center being built by the temple so once that is finished this ward will get to move there, they are SO excited.

After church we went for a drive to see Lago Albano and Rocca di Papa. It was such a fun drive! The Pope's summer house overlooks Lago Albano and it's HUGE. The Pope sure lives a cush life ;) his summer home is hard to see but it's all the way across the lake on the top of the hill.

a pull off overlooking some of the town near the lake

Rocca di Papa is about 5 miles or so from Lago Albano, it is crazy! Houses are like literally built on top of eachother and the roads are tiny tiny. They are still big enough for cars but only small cars. If it ever snowed in this town you wouldn't be able to get around, the roads are insane!

We saw a car zip right through this street so we ran after it to see where it was going, Logan could touch both sides of the road, that was a tiny car!

We had so much fun driving around and finding unique places, it's truly amazing that people live in places like this full time. Another great day!

Day 5: Bracciano

This was by far one of our favorite days in Italy. We drove about an hour out of Rome to a tiny town called Bracciano. We originally went to tour the castle in the town belonging to the Orsini family but when we got there the tours didn't start for 3 hours. We decided to do a little exploring and discovered one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. Bracciano is so small that even cars don't fit on their streets, everyone parks outside of the town and walks everywhere. It was simply beautiful. So beautiful in fact that Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes were married at the castle there! ;)

If you ever go to Rome and have a car I highly recommend exploring this town. We actually preferred finding quaint towns outside of Rome rather than being downtown with a million people.

clearly there are no "building codes" in this town :)

the city overlooks a beautiful lake, how amazing would it be to live right there on the lake?!

We had such a wonderful time walking around the city, eating a little picnic lunch and just enjoying time together. After ooo'ing and ahhh'ing for a couple hours straight we finally headed back home. 

We met up with some people my parents know for some gelato that evening. I am so grateful for these people- Ramon & Lorena and their kids and Danielle & Norma. They are so kind to my parents and were so kind to Logan & I. We fell in love with Ramon & Lorena's kids, four little adorable Spanish speaking boys (they just moved to Rome from Spain to work on the temple). All in all it was a wonderful day :)

Day 4: Downtown Rome

On Friday my parents took the day off from working at the Temple Site and we spent some time downtown. They showed us the bus route/metro to take to go downtown for days they were busy. We got off the metro downtown and the very first thing you see is the Colosseum. It was so fun to walk out of the metro and the Colosseum in just right there and so huge! We also saw the Arch of Constantine, some of the Roman Forum, & the National Monument to Victor Emmanuel II (Italy's first king) aka the Wedding Cake. We had a great day.

Logan with an original mini waiting to buy bus tickets. I think Logan's favorite part of the whole trip was seeing all the different cars.

Colosseum 

we couldn't go inside because they were preparing for the Pope to come for an Easter celebration

Arch of Constantine next to the Colosseum

The arch depicts the battle where Constantine converted to Christianity, a very religiously significant battle. More interesting info here. 

some of the Roman Forum/ancient Rome 

National Monument aka the Wedding Cake

and a few Instagrams of course

We were lucky enough to spend so much time in Italy that we didn't have to cram each day completely full of sight seeing. It was really nice to go out for the day and then go back to my parents for some dinner and relaxing.

Days 1-3: Paris

The first two days of our trip were a little rough, but fun. We flew out at 4:50pm on Tuesday April 3 from Salt Lake on a non-stop  flight to Paris, 11 hours. We were hoping to sleep on the plane since it was an overnight flight, but that didn't happen. We arrived at 11am in Paris and headed for a metro to downtown Paris. We walked all over Paris, from Notre Dame across Lovers Bridge to the Louvre, up the Avenue des Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, down to the Eiffel Tower and back to the metro stop. We were already tired but made the most of our day in Paris. We even got a delicious nutella crepe!

Notre Dame 

 Lovers Bridge (Logan is good at closing his eyes in pictures :))

Louvre

Gardens of the Louvre, kids chasing sailboats in a pond

Arc des Triomphe

Eiffel Tower 

a couple Instagram pictures

Here's where the trip got unpleasant. We had already not slept for 24 hours & walked more than 5 miles around Paris. We headed back to the airport to wait for our plane...that didn't leave for another 10 hours. To wrap it up in a nutshell, we had to stay overnight in the airport and ended up not getting any sleep making it a grand total of nearly 60 hours without sleep.

we dislike the Paris airport now :)

We finally boarded our plane at 7am on Thursday morning to Rome and we couldn't have been more excited to leave. My parents picked us up at the airport and we were so happy to see them! We went back to their apartment and they went back to work for a bit at the Rome Temple Site. We napped from 10am-6:30pm, ate dinner, got our first gelato of the trip and went back to bed from 10pm-7am. 

While we had fun in Paris seeing all the sites, it kinda put a damper on our trip. Needless to say we were happy to be in Rome and had a wonderful time there. 

More posts to come!