For our last day in Rome, we headed to the Colosseum, Forum, and Palatine Hill. The Colosseum, as its name suggests, is quite large and truly an engineering marvel. Since we had purchased a Roma Pass earlier, we were able to skip the long ticket buying lines and walk right into the ruins. Next, we walked around the ruins of the Forum and the Hill for a while before eating an early dinner near Capitoline Hill.

One thing that annoys me about Rome is the large number of unofficial “tour guides” who solicit you to join their tour by promising that you can skip the long lines at major sights. While the line to enter St. Peter’s was quite long, it only took about 20 minutes to traverse, despite the warnings of “2 hour waits” by the guides. Once inside the sights, we overheard some of the tours given by the guides and it seems like most the guides are pretty terrible.

It’s 1 BC! Tomorrow is the start of our transatlantic cruise from Rome to Ft. Lauderdale. Valerie laments that phase 1 of the honeymoon passed by so quickly. I’m very excited to move to the relaxing and fattening phase 2.