My First Miracle

This weekend I drove to Rome to play some Ultimate. I brought with me Pedro, Gianluca, and Stefano. The drive up was pretty uneventful with us arriving about midnight. The first thing we did was drive to Termini (thetrain station) to pick up Valeria (Pedro's girlfriend) because there wasn't room for her in the car for 5 hours. We then drove across town to the place where we were staying. Little did I know that in true Ultimate form we were staying in a small apartment with about 15 other people. BUT, it was a free room in Rome. It was about 2:00 AM by the time we found the place and no one was home. I parked in the only space available and the next morning I found the following sight (see photo above). My car had become part of the neighborhood fruit and vegetable store. After talking nicely to the owners of the store I was able to get out of that spot. Then I had to follow 2 cars as we zigzagged through Rome to the fields. We were split up maybe twice before we arrived and I was proud of my offensive driving which was needed to stay with them. We played Ultimate all day then it was the same desperate drive back to apartment. We went out for dinner and at this hour the streets were getting pretty busy and it was harder to stick together. It was ok because my confidence was growing. Dinner was an amazing thing in itself. We had the full meal for 15 euros (everything including wine, limoncello, caffe, dolce!) I have never come close to getting a deal like this in Rome. Somebody knew somebody because I know where the restaurant is but I know I can't get that deal myself. After dinner, traffic went from bad to worse. I thought we were heading back to the apartment but in fact we were heading to the Piazza Novona. So when they said find a place to park and we were in the middle of Rome at 11:30 PM I thought they must have been joking. They weren't and I got very angry because it really seemed impossible. After about an hour of squeezing through tiny streets and trying to run tourists down I finally squeezed my car on to a piece of open sidewalk and we had a short walk from the Piazza. I was still angry at this crazy idea when we met up with the rest of the crowd. All that work and all we did was throw Frisbee on the Piazza until about 2:00 AM. I will say that my anger slipped away pretty quick because there is something about throwing in the middle of city like that. Lori, Kent, and I threw there last year and it was just a blast for some odd reason. The other people in the piazza must have thought we were insane because for a while we doing a "mac line" (and not very well). Sunday we played some more Ultimate at the same place only in a light rain, which made the field nice and soft. In the end I arrived home at 1:30 AM Sunday night. I consider it a miracle that I did all that driving through some of the tightest situations ever(twice I had to use the passenger side door to get in and out of the car) and the car didn't get a new scratch. I feel like I at least deserve an Italian driver's license. I never committed so many moving violations in my life.