Last you all heard was the beginnings of the description of the harrowing Heathrow event, whereby weary traveler with too many clothes on navigates the reverse path from the bus to terminal 5 back to the parked plane where my passport hopefully was located.  What should’ve taken 25 mins took another 3 hours, but never mind.. to be continued when I have more time.  Suffice to say, going forward in the airport maze is far easier than going backward.  Re-tracing steps with a ball of string or breadcrumbs might have helped, but still i am unsure of this part.

I did actually make my plane to Fiumicino airport, Rome and settled down for a week of conference there with an audience of about 1000 of my international colleagues.  Here are views of the local scenery about 20 mins east of Fiumicino.

But of course it’s the streets of Rome that beckon out of the hotel and down to the city.  Get lost in the via. s. dorotea… its a small street of course on the other side of the river, but a place to sit down in a small local space with local band and music.

Outside of course it was cooling down rapidly and we were distracted by low flying helicopter and even lower flying drones, warded off by the Polizia cars and tape barriers, protecting their pubic and the filmmakers for a Roman James Bond film.

Some days later I found a nice restaurant down at the end of the Corso and hang a right at the Piazza di Spagna, with this beautiful nameplate in the wall.

I think I had a drink there, but cannot be certain, certainly dropped in with my friends to someplace near there anyway.

I had planned to spend more time in the city, however duty calls, and Saturday was spent working in the hotel room and lobby bar.  Sunday flew from Fiumicino out to Montpellier, France. Avis pickup in the misty rain, and fun with Nellie at the desk who laughed everytime I tried to say something in French, and set the navigator to French as well.  Didn’t get lost too many times and my french vocab of road rules and instructions has improved dramatically without further road incident.  Drove around 3 hours out to Nice where more meetings will be held for the first few days this week.