After a nice short nap and a warm shower, I headed down to the lobby for our first meeting. My room was on the fourth floor of the hotel and had this view, which was looking away from Rome.

I was a bit early, so grabbed a couch off to the side to wait. While I enjoy bus tours, being a shy introvert, I hate the group meet. Which is probably why I like travel, it forces you to meet new people. Extroverts, of course, thrive in these situations. Us introverts typically try to avoid them. There are times during travel where I can be extroverted, other times the complete opposite. I have met some really great people and had fantastic conversations on my trips.

Soon enough, other people on the tour started filtering down. Some stopped at the bar to grab a drink and soon enough we all moved out to the patio. The hotel was on a hill north east of Rome and there was a cool breeze in the air as we sat out there listening to our tour guide told us about the upcoming tour.

On these tour groups there are two things that are very important: Name Tags and seat rotation.

The name tags, white with the company name in red letters, were passed around as well as a Sharpie marker. We all diligently printed our names on them and proceeded to ignore them after that. For our age group, I’m not thinking that name tags were the fashion statement we wanted to make. It was fun, however, to see other tour groups from the same company, which skewed older, all wearing their nametags as they walked through attractions herded close together.

The seat rotation rule was also very important and to be followed. Each time we get on the bus we were to move two seats clockwise from where we sat last time. I don’t think there was ever a consensus on whether that meant every time we got on the bus like after restroom breaks, etc. Or major times like first thing in the morning. Either way, this was another rule we didn’t follow much, but we did a good job of sitting in different seats each time.

The company I was touring with does a lot of tours and I suspect that if you looked at the age of their travelers, it tended to scale to 40 and above. They do have a handful of tours focused on a younger audience, which is one of the ones I was one. When I think about it, I suppose that the nametags and seat rotation are more important for the other groups so one person or couple doesn’t sit in the same seat each time. There are certainly some preferred seats on the bus.

It is also during this meeting where you find out what optional excursions will be offered and how good of a salesman your guide is. Before you book your tour, there is usually a long list of potential excursions listed for your tour. The tour manager pairs these down to the ones they feel are most likely to attract the most people. Sometimes this paired down list works well for everyone, but I suspect there are probably one or two excursions on the original list people would have liked to do. I myself would have loved to have gotten out to Tivoli, but that would have certainly been at least a half day if not a full day excursion and with only one full day in Rome, there are many things to see. I’ll save that for another visit.

This is the first time you’ll learn about how great, spectacular, amazing, unbelievable, stunning, breath-taking, outstanding, not-to-be-missed, ancient, really really nice each of these excursions are and how you would be a fool, a fool I tells ya, to miss any of them.

Of course, you’re now doing an add-up of all of the costs of those excursions together to get an idea of how much of a fool you want to be. Are they all really can’t miss things? Or can I save a little bit of coin here by skipping that one and be able to do this one. You don’t have to do every one of them, but group think will almost surely make you do most of them. And honestly, most of them are worth it.

But let’s be honest, the tour guides job is to sell you on those excursions. The travel company has contracted with the excursion operators and promised to deliver so many souls to that excursion. Does that mean you can’t trust anything the tour guide is saying? Absolutely not! I honestly believe that tour guides do love the job their doing and the sites you see. If you’ve never been to Rome, are you going to skip every excursion and try to do it on your own? In the limited time you have on the tour, it’s nearly impossible.

My philosophy is that you can use a guide tour to acclimate yourself to an area and a follow up tour to explore in depth. My first European tour was 14 days around the countries. I later went back and focused on areas I was more interested in. And because of the tour, I had a better idea of what to do and where to focus and how to treat the locals (respect, respect, respect!).

On this tour, I skipped a couple of the excursions because I’ve done them before. But don’t get me wrong, while I didn’t do the coliseum this time, it’s still an amazing place to go and stand in, just looking across it. But I had another agenda during that time which you’ll read in a later piece.

But for now, the meeting was over and we had a couple of minutes to collect ourselves and meet out by the bus. The driver was the same guy from earlier in the day, but we discovered wasn’t our driver for the trip. That driver would be joining us tomorrow. But for now, we all piled into the bus and headed downtown for an included dinner.

The ride down was enjoyable with some chatting between folks getting to know each other. This was also our first look at Rome proper as we drove into the city. There were a lot of political posters up, so an upcoming election. I loved the sidewalk posters pasted to walls on top of older posters. In some areas there were well over half a foot thick of old posters up there. Obviously, it wasn’t he guy putting up the poster whose job it was to clean up old ones.

Soon enough, we were dropped off street side and had a couple of blocks to walk to the restaurant since there were areas the bus couldn’t get to. And we made our way to the restaurant.

Now, I’m not going to lie, included meals are not going to be the finest meals you have on your trip, but neither are they the worst. The restaurants, of course, are contracted with the travel company and they are setup to support large groups, such as ours. I enjoyed all of the included meals, but I’m no foodie.

The meal this evening was more of a traditional Roman meal of veal smothered in olive oil, salad, bread and some pink desert (not sure what that was, but seemed like a mousse). This was the first time I knowingly had veal, so with a little trepidation, I launched forth into the meal. At my table sat three folks from Australia and two folks from New Zealand.

The dinner is peppered with great conversation about past travels and as always when an American is talking to an Australian, a little bit of jealousy creeps in when you learn about their vacation schedules. So much time compared to our own.

Following dinner, we were treated to an evening drive around Rome. I’m a big fan of night illumination on buildings and night photography. There are many places I would have loved to stop and take photos of (which makes me wish even more I would have taken a nice tripod with me). But it is during these little tours that you might learn something new. For example, I never knew about the raised walkway between the Vatican and the Castel Sant’ Angelo. But sure enough, looking at a Google Maps of it, there it is.

So although it may seem at times that your tour guide is talking because they like the sound of their voice, sometimes there are those little nuggets of information in there.

The one place we did stop was outside of the Vatican. We were able to get out and get some photos. I’ve included one as the head photo of this article. While we were there, we were able to watch some vintage cars which were part of the yearly Mille Miglia Vintage Car Race pass us by.

We headed back onto the bus and back to the hotel. Some retreated to their rooms. Tomorrow would be a long, early day as the first excursion is a tour of the Sistine Chapel. Others hung out at the bar for a drink or two before retiring.

Next time: The Vatican, The Pantheon, and The Disabled.