Run up

The first sentence of the book Irrational Man is:

The story is told (by Kierkegaard) of the absent-minded man so abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows he exists until, one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead.

This is a lesson I thought I had learned a number of years ago.  A friend, about my age, woke up one morning immobilized; he had a stroke overnight.  I thought about that and my goals and desires then quit my intensely high paying job and went to Italy for three months; I had always wanted to go.

Well, that lesson seemed to wear off.  I made other trips then life happened and I had other concerns; relocating, new friends and relationships, concerns about money, things got put off. Then about three months ago I woke up with an intense pain in my hip.  The slightest movement would set it off but if I remained frozen it just lingered in the background.  Well, that went away slowly and has only slightly recurred but it was a wake up call.  There is really nothing except my health standing in the way of further travel but my health at my age is problematic.

I decided to return to Italy, to Rome which I love, for an extended stay, a month.  In one form or fashion I laid the above on my beloved and said 'I would love you to go with me but I'm going'.  I am so pleased to say, she's going too.

So I may be an irrational man or a supremely rational man; it matters little because next Monday Nancy and I are getting on a Lufthansa jet and flying, ultimately, to Rome where I was fortunate enough to find an affordable apartment in the heart of the city.  Pictures (from a website), maps, and such are below.

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The red pin in this map and the one below is our location. 

The green door is to our apartment building.  That's the Colosseum at the end of the street.

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For all those "program" people out there, there are English speaking meetings every day within walking distance of the apartment.  In the map below you'll see their locations.  The red circles are their sites, the red rectangle ours, and the blue rectangle the scale.  That's all uphill though so you'll note the blue oval with a white-on-red "M" noting a metro stop right up there.  There's another, which didn't show, about 1000 feet east of our apartment (about where it says "Bar Monti").  A useful website: https://alcoholics-anonymous.eu/meetings/