Friday, 16 October 2026

Oct 16 – Fiumicino, Italy

Santa Maria Porto del Salute
Weather – 24º
hotel view one side

Steps – 12,539


Jet lag…I think you are in the rear-view mirror…kind of. I don’t usually feel it too badly on the way to a vacation – back home is usually a different story. A small nap and in bed at ‘normal’ time is usually the recipe for quickly kicking jet lag. Last night I was asleep by about 10 and wide awake at about 5…I drifted off again until about 730 for a total of 8.5hrs. I was thrilled by that amount, but my Apple watch still scolded me!


other side view

I’m sure I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post how much I detest a rain-head shower, guess what kind of shower is in this room…a rain shower. I really don’t
canal view

see the appeal even for people with little hair – my issue is getting all of my hair wet and then rinsed. It’s also an ordeal when I don’t want to get my hair wet at all. There is a hand-held wand thingy, but it’s mounted at chest height, so not much help. Anyway…this isn’t a huge problem…and I coped.

Breakfast, like the hotel, was basic, but did the trick…scrambled eggs, bacon, pastries, meat, cheese, cappuccino machine. The most interesting was the café yogurt. There was a surprising lack of fruit. I suppose I could have grabbed a whole piece from the fruit bowl but wasn’t about to start carving up fruit.

church of the holy crucifix

The best thing about breakfast was the lack of crowd. Typically, hotel breakfasts are bustling situations with only 1 or 2 open tables, this morning we were one of a handful of other tables – molto bene! Not sure if this is typical for Fiumicino, the
lunch

small size of the hotel, or because we’re a bit off-season, but the lack of breakfast and front desk frenzy is welcome. We even had our room cleaned while we were at breakfast.

The rest of the morning was spent in the room (it was a bit cool to sit outside, our balcony being in the shade) listening to Italian music on the TV, blogging and watching the new port being built just outside our hotel.

Around noon, we set off for a wander, our goal being calamari and a glass of wine…mission accomplished-ish, we had to have a bottle, just had to. Last night, every place we

a rare sighting of street art

passed had a handful of fried fish variations on the menu for about €15. Some were take-away hold a cone of calamari in your hand places and some were sit-down white tablecloth places. We opted for something in the middle, or so we thought.

We went into a place right on the water, next to where we were last night, and as it turned out because we weren’t having a meal, we were taken through that place and into the place from last night…same waiter even!

The calamari was typical, lightly breaded rings – tasty, washed down with a bottle of Vermentino.

dinner

We wandered around in the almost perfect weather – (warm, sunny, but not hot) more of the town, stopping at a couple of churches, both small - one very simple, the other more decorated. Somehow we travelled along the hair salon/barber row before we were back along the sea.

After lunch, I went to nap town.

rooftop night cap

Dinner was more wine, focaccia, and squid…a whole squid! It came with mango and roasted onion sauce…tasty!

On the way back to the hotel, we tried buying a €2 beer from a street side vending machine – no luck, it didn’t like my foreign ID, I didn’t really need the beer, but wanted to try it for the fun of it.

A night cap on the rooftop hotel bar and that was the day!

Thanks anonymous, it was a lovely setting!

No comments: