Different directions

After a great few days together with Maddie and Sophie touring Italy in our Mafia style rental car, tomorrow we split up and go our separate ways. Merran returns to Australia, to home and back to work. Maddie heads back to school for her last four weeks, and Soph and I catch a scenic train over the Alps to Munich (I think via Innsbruck).

Venice was great, two perfect but cold days to explore the city. We even ran into friends from Sheffield in St Marks Square!!!

We have enjoyed staying again for a couple of days with Maddie's host family who today included us in a family birthday party. Fantastic home style Italian food. Soph and I have the IPad so the blog will now follow us.

A different style of pilgrimage

We picked up a rather flash and quite large (for Italy) hire car on Monday morning and navigated our way carefully out of Rome to Orvieto. A fabulous lunch with our friend Kaye followed as we collected some gear we had left with her when we travelled through. Then it was over the mountains to Jesi where we met and stayed with one of Maddie's adult support people Fiona and Paulo. Fiona is a teacher at Maddie's former school and it was great to meet her. We appreciated their hospitality. On Tuesday we enjoyed exploring Jesi and meeting one of Maddie's friends for afternoon tea at their favorite meeting place. Back to Fiona's again for the evening where after dinner we discovered to our distress that the house had been burgled during the day and money, jewelry and Maddie's laptop were stolen. Tragically this contained all her Italian photos from her exchange year and a novel she has been working on for 4 years, so it was a little distressing for us as well as our hosts. We all felt a little flat for the next day. A visit with the police the next morning held us up a bit but we were ready go by lunch time and made our way to Ravenna.

The early Christian mosaics of Ravenna were fantastic and we all enjoyed spending some time exploring the various sites where these still survive. We had a great meal on the recommendation of a shop keeper where Sophie bought a new winter coat.

Today we spent the morning back in Ravenna before heading north to Venice. It was dark by the time we arrived so it was a fun finding the Hostel out on one of the Islands facing the main square. We settled in and down to bed early however there is a large very undisciplined French school group here who are extremely noisy..... And it is 1.00am. They show no signs of settling in spite of several of our fellow dorm mates asking them to show some respect an the hostel rules which indicate expulsion for noise!!

Always a pilgrim(2)

We saw this very apt cartoon up at the Pilgrim hospice in Rome run by the confraternity of St James.

The caption reads, "Don't worry, Signora, he will be over it by the spring".

The funny thing is we have met so many men who do not get over it quite so easily and leave again on longer pilgrimages. We head of one man who left his wife and family for 11 years!!

Always pilgrims

For the last 39 days our focus has been to get a step closer to Rome each day. As Tim wrote, we all had a huge sense of anticipation and elation as we walked the final 17 kms into St Peters Square only 2 days ago. Sophie and I could hardly walk for the next few hours and hobbled around, and we finished our journey by arriving at a wonderful hostel for pilgrims to Rome, where we were warmly greeted by the volunteer looking after the pilgrims, and had reunions with several other pilgrims we had met on the way. Meal times were special to catch up and celebrate together.

Yesterday we had the privilege of farewelling a young German man who has walked from Germany, and now continuing his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a total of 5000 km. As you can imagine, we are keen to follow his ongoing journey. Then we visited St Peter's Basilica before meeting Maddie who had taken a train from Milan early in the morning. Still, it seemed strange that it took her 8 hours and us 39 days to cover a similar distance! It was wonderful to reconnect and introduce her to a taste of what has been our life for the past 6 weeks.

This morning we finally left our pilgrim world behind. Tim's comment that we had finished as pilgrims, though, was met by the response that the pilgrimage had only just begun. We had some more goodbyes, and set out for the Colosseum. Getting there before 9 am we simply wandered straight in, and spent the next few hours in Roman ruins. After lunch we visited a museum with a Renaissance art exhibition, the highlight being an original portrait of Martin Luther and his wife Katherine.

We have now settled into a local B&B, which is not quite what we expected, quite funny really, and heading out for an Indian meal.

With love from Merran.

Rome!

It was all smiles as we hit the outskirts of Rome this morning and wove our way through the traffic and a couple of nice parks to St Peters. The feeling was almost euphoric even if it was hiding lots of aches and pains. Just as we walked through the arches into St Peters square, Pascale a French woman we have walked with for a few days, came up to greet us.

Tourists have little idea of the joy and wonder that pilgrims feel on reaching their goal. It is wonderful. We picked up our testimonials and went for lunch. Then it was back to the square for a while to savour the atmosphere. Then navigated the very crowded bus service to our accommodation at the confraternity of pilgrims to Rome centre.

A great day we will long remember.

There are more photos and posts coming over the next few days as we have a good connection here and will want to stop and reflect a little on our journey.

Thanks everyone for your support and prayers. It has meant a lot to us to know people were praying for us on this journey.

All roads lead to Rome: ours does today!

Thanks to those pilgrims who have emailed, blessed and wished us well for our arrival in Rome today. Thanks for the warnings on traffic. We are going to give it a go, even though the Via Cassia is a chaotic. We will head to the Vatican hopefully by lunch time.

Pace e bene, everyone.

The short cut

It is quite a relief to be writing this as it indicates that we have settled into our accommodation for the evening after a long day. We are actually hobbling around the room in fits of laughter as we are all incredibly stiff and tired after a late start and a longer than expected day walking into La Storta.

We enjoyed our evening with other pilgrims last night and met again at a bar for breakfast - the usual coffee/hot chocolate and brioche healthy breakfast I recommend to all my patients - then covered about 9 km by 11 am. We had many hills to climb and descend, and passed a couple of quite emaciated horned cattle, a bit too closely for Sophie's comfort, in a national park. Our reward: hot slices of pizza and fresh pork rolls in Fornello. But we started to drag after that and decided to take a short cut that would cut our journey from 25 to 20 km. We began along it, but the traffic was so intense I told the others that I couldn't face it, so we changed plans and walked back to the official via Francigena after all. This route was very rural, but had quite uneven surfaces to walk on, with roads closed, damaged bridges and strewn rubbish from the recent floods. We had an interesting river crossing with huge stepping stones, thankfully intact after the floods. So our short cut ended up being a long cut, and it was getting cold and dark as we finally walked into La Storta. Tim, our trusty team leader, stopped at a bar for hot chocolates to warm and encourage us. We had hoped to stay in a monastery tonight, but couldn't easily find it. Sophie noticed a hotel right behind us, so we booked in here instead. Hot showers, in-room wi-fi and a pizza delivery to the room for tea. We have been laughing at the smell of our feet as we took off our boots.

We have been laughing also today about some of our attempts at language. Walking along the road yesterday my mobile rang. Assuming (correctly as it turned out) that it was a priest returning our call about accommodation in Campagnia di Roma, I attempted to copy what Tim says on the phone, we are 3 pellegrini from Australia, do you have lodging for the night. The priest was trying so hard to understand me, but thought I was saying we wanted 43 salami to stay. Tim got the message through much better, even able to understand the response. On the other hand, it is good we understand a little Italiano, otherwise we could be slightly offended when we arrive in a parish house, and the welcomer says kindly, Stanke? (This is actually asking us if we are tired after our long walk, but the English phonetic is probably more accurate.)

So, very tired, slightly silly, stiff and sore, we are also extremely grateful for the adventure we have had so far, and very excited about walking into Rome tomorrow.

With love from Merran.