Camilla Ransom
After a fantastic weekend in the UK we were back in Rome and in full-on tourist mode. On Wednesday we visited the Colosseum which really was just as impressive as we’d hoped. After having seen the long queue for tickets we booked a pair online which allowed us to skip the line and head straight in. On Thursday we went to visit the Vatican museums and the Sistine Chapel and on the way back meandered through the old town stopping off in a tiny wine bar and later for some ice-cream on the way back to the station. There’s still so much more to see still that a second visit is definitely on the cards.
On Thursday evening we sketched out a plan for the coming few weeks. We wanted to be on northern Sicily by next Thursday to meet up with some Fastnet friends who happened also to be sailing around the islands. The forecast however showed some strong winds developing over the Tyrrhenian Sea, which meant we’d actually need to do the 240NM trip to arrive by Tuesday morning, which didn’t give us much time. Our best bet seemed to be to head for Ponza (60NM south) early on Saturday morning to arrive Sunday night, then leave Ponza on Monday afternoon and do the 180NM trip to the Sicilian islands to arrive by Tuesday morning, latest. It was all going to be a bit more rushed than we’d hoped, but hey, that’s life.
Friday was a (much needed) quiet day. It’d been quite a mental transition and a huge change in scenery going from cruising (just the two of us) to being back in the UK and Germany (surrounded by friends and family who we realised how much we’d missed!) to being back on the boat again. We needed some time to process it all.
Tom energetically got up early for a run along the beach, whilst I lazily lay in bed dozing. In the afternoon we went shopping then checked out of the marina. Whilst we were in the office we got chatting to a British couple who’d been cruising for the last two years. It’s amazing how many topics you can cover in just a few minutes – the highs and lows of cruising, wind conditions, places to go to, places to avoid, where to pick up fuel – we felt like we’d known them for ages by the time we left!
