My impromptu 2 1/2 month trip to Milan, Italy....and everywhere in between....with my boyfriend Shane :)

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

It's Finally Hitting Me

Up until now I've just been thinking about my upcoming trip to Europe, but last night Shane and I finally sat down (a little late in the game in my opinion) and made our plans for New Year's. We will be staying one night somewhere in Milan, then using our handy-dandy 10-day Italy Eurail pass to make the trek down to Rome, where we will spend a week celebrating the intro of 2010 with the people who know how to celebrate the best. After a few hours of searching through various hostels online and groaning over the skyrocketed holiday prices, I finally convinced Shane to just book the hostel that Lydia and I had stayed at previously: Freedom Traveler hostel. Seemed good enough, so we booked it through the 6th so we could be there for Italy's Epiphany.

Let's get sidetracked for a minute: For those of you who don't know what Epiphany is, it's a Christian feast day
which celebrates the revelation of God in human form in the person of Jesus Christ. (I just now copied and pasted that from Google because I had no idea what it was either.) I read that in Vatican City a procession of hundreds of people in medieval costumes walk along the wide avenue leading up to the Vatican, carrying symbolic gifts for the Pope. The Pope says a morning mass in St Peter's Basilica to commemorate the visit of the wise men bearing gifts for Jesus. So although I'm not Catholic and have nothing to do with the Pope, I can't help but be excited to be there during their traditional celebration.

Back to that hostel. Unfortunately after we booked our week's stay and breathed a sigh of relief (I'm certain mine was bigger than Shane's), we noticed that it had booked us for the wrong dates! Great. Suck back in that sigh of relief. Upon writing them an email questioning this disaster, we were told that reservations for this time of year were required to be 4 days' stay and must begin on the 29th of December. Not possible, since we would be in the air on that day. Thankfully Shane, being the cautious, no-risk person that he is had taken advantage of their $2 cancellation protection, which allowed us to receive a credit for the deposit that could be used to book a different hostel on that same website. (Hostelworld.com, for other travelers out there.)

Because our plans had been demolished and we could start all over, we decided that since we'd be in southernish Italy for a whole week, we should just book the first two nights in Rome and then use our Eurail pass to travel to other neighboring cities during the week before going back to Rome for Epiphany. So my afternoon consisted of searching the alarmingly increasing lack of hostel vacancies for the first two nights' stay in Rome. I even entertained the idea of using couchsurfing.com, which is a network of thousands of people worldwide opening their homes to travelers free of charge, lending a couch and a hot shower for a night or two. If I were more familiar with this method of travel and had thought ahead to avoid the holiday rush, this would be a great way to save money. Maybe in our future travels we will look into it. But for now I finally found and booked a room in Pensione Giamaica, and actually was able to snag a private room with two twin beds for about the same price as some other 12-bed hostel rooms. This will make Shane happy because he's never done the hostel scene before and is concerned about theft in a room of 12 beds with 12 strangers. Understandable. Hopefully this will decrease those chances....this once. Haha. Overall, I hope that he is able to see the fun and enjoyment of living a bit on the unknown side by not quite knowing where your next bed or meal will be, or sharing a room with 12 fellow travelers who usually turn out to be quite friendly and interesting. While not always fun during, those are some of the things I remember most fondly from my previous Europe excursions.

With the issue of where to lay our heads the first two nights in Rome taken care of, my next quest will be for a place to stay in Milan the first night, luggage storage in Milan so we don't have to sweat too much trying to get on the train, and places to visit during our week in southern Italy. Wish me luck! :)