Day 13: A Panoply of Pantheon pAntics

Today Whitney and I boarded a 5am vaporetto for a 6am express train from Venice to Rome. It was like a totally different world to not have to navigate around tourists on land or gondolas on water. Also, it's hard to beat the soft, colorful glow of a sunrise for photos. 

We prepared well for our 3.5 hr ride. 

After arriving at the Tiburtina train station, we looked up google directions to our hotel. We had a nice surprise when we came out of the metro stop, and BAM, the Coliseum stood there like a friendly guard dog. 

As an aside, it's been REALLY nice to have a cell phone with a data package here. It's a very different experience from 15 years ago... for better and for worse. It's been interesting to see how the trinket hawkers have changed their goods to relate to the change in technology: selfie sticks and mobile battery chargers for cell phones. 

Our hotel let us check in early (it's amazing how relaxing that feels after not receiving the luxury post other recent morning arrivals), and off to the Forum and Coliseum we went!

The weather was pretty warm (I changed into short sleeves, shorts, and sandles!), and soon we felt like we had the beginnings of heat exhaustion. I checked my phone... 72 degrees. We were in the sun, ok?? But I think NW Europe conditioned us to cooler climates. 

Whitney and I love dinosaurs, and we take any chance we can get to channel our dino spirits. 

Then we walked up to the Pantheon. Along the way, we frequently heard cheers and moans from restaurants and bars. No, it wasn't gladiator battles, but a soccer game. 

The Pantheon was beautiful in its symmetry and geometrical design. Probably most impressive is its dome, that still looks new after many hundreds of years. If you revolved the base of the dome around itself, you'd outline a large sphere, the bottom of which would grace the Pantheon floor. 

We decided to honor such an amazing feat in design and construction by taking silly pictures with it! Back in my Odyssey of the Mind days (now called Destination Imagination), we would exercise our creative juices by re-defining objects as something else (like saying that tweezers are antennae, a beak, angry eyebrows, stilts for mice, etc). Whitney obligingly played along. 

Here are our entries:

A halo

A gold coin

A lollipop

A volleyball

A bubble

A blingy ring