Taking on New Adventures

I saw a Tweet in September 2022 from the Ryder Cup that the lottery was opening the next day for tickets to the 2023 edition, being held in Rome. On a whim, I set my alarm and the next day, registered for a few days of the tournament. I figured at worst, I’d get an email saying “You weren’t selected”.

Fast forward to the first week of November, and I got an email saying I won the lottery for Wednesday’s practice round, Thursday’s final team practice and opening ceremony, and Saturday’s foursome and four-ball play. I had 3 days to decide if we wanted to purchase, and only 5 days total to complete the purchase. So Chuck and I discussed it, and decided to go for it!

We bought the tickets and started the process to get Chuck’s passport. I started researching flights, places to stay (within our budget) and what days we wanted to go that meshed with the time off we were able to take. By the end of 2022, we had decided to do 10 days in Rome, and end our trip with the event. Chuck had never been so he wanted time to explore and not be rushed with anything. Made sense to me and since I love Rome, I had no objections to staying there the whole time.

Once we decided on that, I started looking at hotel options. Holy expensive! I knew it would be bad but wow. The hotels I had been looking at for a previous trip we thought about taking there were 3 and 4 times more expensive. So then I started looking at apartments through Home Away.

When trying to see if we could start in a hotel and move to an apartment, I saw that Marriott offered homes through their Homes and Villas program. So I clicked on that link and started looking at apartments in Rome. We found one we liked, that was a bit less expensive than we anticipated, and was located near the Vatican. So I booked it and we were all set for our adventure.

Flights came next and we managed a direct from JFK on Delta that gave us the chance to sit in Comfort Plus and give us a little more room to spread out and get some sleep on the trip over.

In July 2023, we finally got our digital tickets to the tournament. Due to Italian law, you can’t really sell them on sites like SeatGeek or StubHub, and all tickets had to be assigned to a person, along with their birthdate and contact info. I had a friend of a friend interested in purchasing one day of the practice round tickets from me, so was able to get back the money we spent on those tickets and assign that day to his boss and friend. It worked out great!

Chuck and I had our tickets assigned and once the Ryder Cup updated their app, we were able to download them to attend the event. Outfits selected and packed, we made our way to Rome a little over a week before we were hitting the Ryder Cup.

Stay tuned as we have more to come on not only on the actual event but also our time in Rome and the great food and wine we hit on our epic trip there!