Have you ever stopped in the middle of something random that’s entered your life and just laughed and thought “I have no idea how I got into this, except God…”

Just when I thought our Jordan adventure was as full of adventure as it possibly could be, the plot thickened: it’s called an 8 hour layover en route.

We landed in Rome at 7 am and thanks to the hours we’d spent previously surfing the web, reading up on how to catch a train from the airport to downtown- it wasn’t long until we were boarded and traveling again.

Our adventure was amazing. We spent €3 on a map that did a decent job of getting us to where we were going. (I discovered later that the map was in Spanish 🤔 maybe that explains why things began to unravel towards the end of our visit🤷🏻‍♀️)

Our main goal was to see the Colosseum and as much ancient history as possible- so we set out, stopping occasionally to take pics of narrow streets and beautiful window boxes.

This is a beautiful City.

And the Colosseum is impressive. We didn’t have time for a tour- and judging from the masses of people who were standing in line waiting for the place to open, I’m glad we weren’t counting on it.

Every thing went off flawlessly until I uttered the infamous words “hey we are near the Trevi Fountain, want to go see that while we are here?” So we took a side road following our supposed trusty map and circled and asked store owners with varying degrees of English and stopped by McDonalds and tried to get info using their WiFi as the battery on my phone dipped down below 10%. 🤔 In the end, we walked around the block at McD’s and met a tour group. We jumped in behind them, following them to the right spot, and joined the throngs attempting to throw coins into the fountain. Not worth it.

So there we were at the Fountain with a Spanish map that had failed. By this time it had been tooo long since any of us had slept, and tooo many miles since anybody had eaten. We would finally find a street name and then guess at what direction we needed to be heading.

I’ve always heard “when you’re in Rome you do like the Romans” so we swung in for Gelato for breakfast while we planned our next attack (don’t judge).

I guess the sugar kicked in because it wasn’t long before we’d made the right connections and were headed back to the trainstation as fast as our shoes would take us.

And some 7.5 miles later, we made our train with about 3 minutes to spare. Why was I worried?

*note for next time: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither can it be explored in a day- but it was well worth the adventure.

We learned a lot from round one: so we went back to the drawing board for the grand finale. I downloaded ENGLISH maps for the event. We again hit up google, and asked lots of questions from those who’d visited before. The reports varied: “not enough time” ” you’ll be fine!” “The train is super confusing” “most people speak English, but are stingy with it, preferring for you to speak their language” hmmm

So with a combined amount of trepidation, exhaustion, and excitement- we entered the custom lines in Paris.

In a lot of ways this stop was less stressful than Rome, other than when we almost crashed and burned switching trains near Notre Dame ( why would they list all the stops the train makes excluding the ones on the map🤷🏻‍♀️) but we found an angel who spoke English and pointed us in the right direction.

We were early- like 7 am and the clouds threatened and only the gardeners were out. It was beautiful!

We hiked along the Seine River trying not to get run over by the super ambitious bikers and runners out getting in their morning exercise. There is to much culture along the river.

We checked on the rebuilding efforts at Notre Dame and decided that they really didn’t need our help, and caught the train back to the airport. Thankfully we managed to catch the express train- so in no time, we were back in line at customs, reviewing the pics on our phones to verify that we’d actually been there. This was an easy day- we didn’t even walk 7 miles. But no sleep/ no food/ it felt good to be back in time for the flight. 😅

These ladies are the best adventures. 💞 (this pic is from Wadi Rum because the selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower is not worthy to be posted)

So thankful for God’s blessing on a sense of adventure. I know that He was there carefully supervising as we put each piece into our gigantic travel puzzle.

Only regrets- didn’t have time for Pizza in Rome, or crepes in Paris. Next time?

I hope you can sense God’s input in your adventure too.

Blessings,

Kendra