March 31, 2006 – Friday – Tripoli to Rome

We fly out of Tripoli aboard Alitalia to Rome in the afternoon, flying over the Mediterranean Sea and spotting both Mount Etna and Sicily along the route.

Our bus that meets us at the Rome airport is very deluxe: a Mercedes with lots of room (since several of our group left us in Tripoli to return home directly). We check into our hotel, the Grand Palazzo Carpegna. Our hotel rooms are tiny, but very well appointed. In retrospect, this turns out to be the best accommodation we have in the two week trip.

Before dinner a few of us gather in the hotel lounge and have a couple of drinks over stories of our Libyan adventure. These drinks are somewhat of an event, considering we have just traveled a week in a dry country. The strongest drink you could order in Libya was an espresso!

Our bus picks us up at 8pm this evening to take us to Castel Gondolfo for a tour of the Vatican Observatory.