Will and Deidre's not so excellent adventure...

So we got back to the hotel, and Will went out to buy a bottle of water for Deidre. Will had taken the keys, and since we're staying in older, family-run hotels, the door to our room locked with a key from the inside and the outside. Deidre asked Will to lock the door when he left, thinking he'd be back in 10 minutes. Mistake number 1.

One and a half hours later, Will had not come back. At this point, Deidre was worried, locked in the room and it was 10:30 at night. So, knowing he was either lost, or something else had happened, she had to figure out a way to get out of the room. Since we were one level above reception in the building, there wouldn't be any way to get their attention. She looked out the window and decided 4 stories was too high to jump down, and there was no drain pipe to shimmy down. Finally, she located the cell phone in Will's backpack, and called reception. Of course, they were closed, but luckily, on the 3rd call (she can be relentless), someone answered. Unfortunately, that person didn't speak english well, and Deidre had to explain she was locked in the room and needed to get out. Finally, he just said, ok, i'll come up to your room. After the receptionist let her out, she had to explain why she didn't have the keys. After a lot of hand gestures, the hotel owner was laughing his ass off and Deidre slowly sulked towards the front door, trying to decide whether to call police stations or hospitals first, but then settling on going to our emergency lost meeting spot, the train station (the only thing we did right).

What had happened, was since it was Sunday, the stores on our street were closed, so they directed Will to other stores that were open. Well, Rome is not an easy city to navigate, even WITH a GOOD map, so even though Will came back to close to the same street, it wasn't the right one. Not that it would have helped anyway, since he had memorized what the inside glass door looked like, and by the time he gotten back, they had closed the wood ones. We're sure the secret's out by now that Deidre did most (all) of the trip planning, and never told Will the name of the hotel we were staying at, the address, or the phone number (mistake number 2) since we were always together.  So the poor guy walked up and down the street that was one block away, and asked each and every single hotel if the key he had belonged to them and if they knew where it would open a door.

After an hour, he decided it was hopeless and started walking. Luckily, after 20 minutes wandering aimlessly, he ran into a nice group of drunken Irishmen who told him how to get to the train station, where he decided to go since it was our emergency meeting spot, and pray that Deidre would show up in the next day and a half so we could catch the flight back to London.

Lucky for him, 2 and a half hours after he had left to buy a bottle of water, a very relieved Deidre came walking up a sidewalk to the train station to rescue a very disgruntled Will. Both exhausted, we walked back to the hotel WITH the bottle of water and spent the rest of the evening Rome-bashing and being thankful for emergency plans and train stations.