Nantes and Our First Evening in Roma

As most of you know, or have figured out from pictures  I recently went on a trip to Rome and France. We had a bank holiday weekend and Abby, Meg and I decided to use it to travel. We all headed out early Friday morning to start our holiday with a visit to our fellow Grovers at the Grove City campus in Nantes, France. When we got there we dragged our friend Ethan out of bed to show us the city. It turned out he really didn’t know all that much about the city he’s been leaving in for two months, so I ended up having to find our way to the sites of Nantes.  Our biggest priority was to see the mechanical elephant, which we had heard was fantastic. And guess what? It was. You can check out some video of it on our vlog (INSERT LINK). It walks around and shoots water and blinks and it’s great.  After the elephant we went to see the castle in Nantes, which was the home of Queen Anne, I believe. It was lovely, but the views were not as beautiful as our Irish castles. That night Meg, Ethan and I went to Buck Mulligan’s, an Irish pub that they frequent. It was good craic (for those non-Irish out there, that means it was fun).

               

After a night of no sleep for me and a little sleep for Meg the two of us jumped in a cab at 4am to take us to the Nantes airport for our flight to Rome! Well to Palma Mallorca and then Rome…oh those Ryan Air layovers…we slept in the airport for a few hours until about a half hour before our flight, when I realized that we needed to get our tickets stamped at the Ryan Air desk…which was located near the Airport Check-in desks. Which meant sprinting through the airport, finding the desk (which was of course at the farthest possible point from where we had been, speeding through security, sprinting BACK through the airport, almost taking out some old people and a couple of perfume displays and screeching into our gate right about when the gate should have been closing. Luckily, everything was running late and we had plenty of time to catch our breathes and feel less like we were going to die. It was more exercise than I had had in months. But my father, notorious for his “we’ll make it” attitude when it comes to travel, would have been proud of our efforts. We’ve decided that the definition of rushing is running between people movers in airports. There was no way we were missing that plane.

               

         Before we knew it we were in Rome, Italy. After some slightly sketchy bus and metro stations we found our way to our hostel, which was…interesting. It was one of the best rated hostels in Rome, but we did not love it. The showers smelled weird, the toilets were broken and the guy at the front desk was kind of rude. But hey, you get what you pay for. The first night we met some Canadian girls who were nice, but sadly it was their last night there. I wasn’t feeling too great, so I ended up watching Roman Holiday alone in my bed while Meg chatted away with the other Canadians. Which was fine by me, occasional loner that I am.