Two Adventurers

Fiumicino – 31 October – 1 November 2009

During our typical Italian breakfast of  croissants with jam, tiny sponge cakes and coffee, the young Eritrean (Ethiopian) B & B cleaning girl, Silvia,  told us the surprising story of two American couples who had stayed there just a few days earlier. When asked to pay their bills as they were leaving, both couples refused to pay, so Silvia phoned the Police who arrived before long. At this point they agreed to pay for just two nights each, instead of the week they had stayed and after the Police had left the younger male threatened to return and kill Silvia as well as other dreadful things. One couple was in their 50s and the other in their 30s and it seems that after they had left it was discovered they had managed to steal two pink ceramic toilet seats from the two bathrooms! As well as this, they nabbed a beautiful vase from the bedroom and the remote controls for the airconditioner! Unbelievable!

Try as we might, we could not locate any Wifi or Broadband connections in the local area so the blog just has to wait. Took a lovely stroll along past all of the fishing boats by the wharf, where there were also numerous market stalls with people selling a variety of goods, carpets, umbrellas, scarves, knitted beanies and jewellery. Also, we could not help but notice the huge number of jets taking off at about one minute intervals from the nearby main Rome airport.

A nice little seaside area called Ostia, with apartments on every street in town, was the subject of a visit from us the following day, and the wind was howling in as we walked along the seafront. By chance there was a MacDonald’s eatery where we hoped to hook in to their Wifi but unfortunately we needed an Italian Sim card so were unable to use the Wifi! There was a busker playing classical guitar music which gave a lovely tone to the area.

We found some dogs which we guessed belonged to some of the stall holders.

The fuel tank on our car was now almost empty (we needed to return it to Hertz full up) but all of the local service stations were out of ‘benzine’ as they call it, though there was plenty of Diesel available. It was dark when we finally located one which had some and with a sigh of relief we put in 60 Euros worth as we needed to return it first thing the next morning at the airport before we flew out on Baboo.