As I have said before, I am doing a couple of training events for the Planets project. Last week was the final one, in Rome. Lovely place to be in April, great weather, great city, just lovely. But then… The volcano eruption in Iceland that ruined travel for most people in and around Europe was ruining my week too. We (a colleague and I) were supposed to fly to Rome (from Schiphol) on Sunday, but on Friday evening it seemed clear that there would be no flights out of Amsterdam on the Sunday. Other colleagues, travelling from the UK, Schotland, Austria and Germany were having the same problems.

After a lot of calling around, getting permissions, figuring things out, we decided to… drive! My colleague and her husband rented a car, I hopped it, and he drove us to Rome. Crazy, I know. On the Saturday we drove almost all the way to Milan. We wanted to stop in Como, but literally all hotels were full. Nice. We arrived late, had dinner late, and I was just dead tired. The next day, Sunday, we drove to Rome’s airport, where we parked the car at long-stay, and traveled by train into Rome. We got separated because of a slight luggage mishap, so when I arrived in Rome, after two days travel,  I just hopped in a cab which drove me to the hotel.

The stay in Rome, and the training event, were lovely. Not only the speakers had trouble traveling to Rome, so did the delegates. In the end we had a fluctuating number of delegates between 10 and 15. Not quite the group of 60+ we had in London, but oh well. We did get to enjoy an arranged tour of the city, a lovely dinner, and a look at the archives of the university that was hosting the event.

We left Rome on Thursday, and after another two days in the car (spending the night near Como this time), we arrived back in Holland on Friday evening. A long adventure… but a good one!