Taking on New Adventures

It was here! Finally. After a year of planning, Chuck and I made our way to Rome for a week of fun prior to going to the Ryder Cup.

As I mentioned before, we had tickets to Thursday’s final practice round and Saturday’s main event. So on Wednesday, we made the decision to check out the Metro in Rome since I hadn’t been on it before. We really just wanted to familiarize ourselves with the stops and the transfer area at the main Stazione that we’d need to take.

We realized quickly we needed to leave earlier than planned, so we made our plan to walk out of the apartment we were staying in around 6am on Thursday. We walked the 10 minutes or so to the Metro, bought our ticket and headed to the platform.

It took roughly 30 minutes to get to the station that had the buses to take us to the golf course. Another 45 minutes on the bus and we were there! Then, we had another 20 minute or so walk to the main gates before we were finally inside the fan area.

We decided to go to the Ryder Cup store first to get the souvenirs we knew we wanted. Not ideal to carry around our stuff all day, but the line wasn’t crazy long so we figured that was a good time to shop. And I’m so glad we did! When we left later that day, the line was more than double what it was when we arrived.

After we spent our money, we decided to go check out the American teams, who were on the back nine. We started at 10, walked up the hill to the 12th tee, stopping along the way. As a New Orleans resident who is used to primarily flat land, this hill was massive. And we were sore when we got to the top!

After stopping to watch the teams, we walked down the hill to the 13th tee, then over to 17 and 18 to watch the end of the Junior Ryder Cup and scope out our plan for Saturday.

After 8 hours of walking around, we decided to head back to the city and made our way to the bus and then the Metro. Two hours later, we were at our stop and grabbed some food before heading back to the apartment.

Saturday came and we decided to take the train to the bus rather than the Metro. So we left at 545am and hit the Metro to the main train station. From there, we bought our ticket and boarded the train to the bus stop. While the train ride took about 25 minutes, the bus only took about 15 minutes and the walk into the area was much shorter. Less than 10 minutes after getting off the bus, we were inside the Ryder Cup area, ready to watch the golf.

While the US did not play well the first two days, we did see them win a few holes and play better on Saturday than they did on Friday. We saw every single player from both teams, which was really fun. We also made our way to some holes we didn’t get to check out on Thursday.

The atmosphere was great, and the golf course was really cool, hills and all. We saw some great golf and really just enjoyed everything about the Ryder Cup.