I lied, okay? I sort of forgot that I was going to blog some more at work, and ended up racing through a book because I was really ready to be done with it. But let the vacation round-up begin!
Day 1
Our plane lands at 8 am or so, on Friday April 20th. Flying overseas sucks if you can't sleep on airplanes, and I slept the most out of the four of us, with a solid 3 to 4 hour chunk of sleep time. Sleep deprivation + half an Ambien = sleepy time in a coach seat. Needless to say, we were tired. But my dad picked up a rental car--a Chrysler mini-van, which is a completely inappropriate driving machine if you're planning on being in any cities--and a GPS rental, and we set off for Florence. We stopped at one of the first AutoGrills we saw, and ate our first Italian food. Let it be said: roadside food in Italy is fortythousandmillionbajillion times better than any crap we get at highway oases. And that first stop would set sort of a pattern up, because any time we all got in a car, we stopped at an Autogrill somewhere.
But tiredness conquered hunger, and my dad relinquished his driving seat to his wife, which was fine, except for when the GPS failed and we ended up in Florence going around in circles but NOT at our hotel. We were tired, and I was feeling like I wanted a shower more than anything else in the world, and well, it was fine. We got there, eventually. We slept. A lot. We showered (well, S and I did). And then we went to dinner at a place that curiously, didn't know how to cook pasta al dente. But I hasten to add, the food was good. Then we ate gelato (thus setting up another pattern, because I'm quite certain that there was only one night, out of what? 11? that we didn't eat gelato after dinner. And that's not saying that we didn't eat it after lunch. Or before our evening nap. Whatever. What I'm saying is, we ate so much gelato I gained five pounds.), and went back to the hotel and slept.
Day 2
Are you bored yet? I hope not, because there's still 10 days of this crap. This day started out badly. S set his alarm for 7:30. We heard a knock on the door, S looked at his watch, and thus the ball rolled downhill. It was 9:23. Our tour guide? Arriving at the hotel at 9:30. Not so dire, considering we had showered the night before, but not the greatest start to our first day in Italy. So we did a guided tour, which was lovely. And then we ate a spectacular meal, possibly one of the very best we had in Italy in the entire 10 days, which is saying something, let me tell you. For future Italy goers, the restaurant we had this stunner in is "Le Pennelle" and it's just down the street from Dante's house. Check it out.
The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. Shopping. Dinner. I did make a bad choice on my dinner, ordering fish, but it's okay, because I ate enough other food to be fine. Oh, and the prosciutto at the restaurant had hair. I mean, the leg they cut it from was hairy. Yay for hairy ham! (It was also, in its defense, possibly the most delicious of the trip. So suck it, hair haters. Eat the hairy ham, you won't be sorry.)
Day 3
We spent the morning in San Gimignano, which is as nice a town as I've ever been in, and has some really, really good gelato, according to my dad and S. It was a lovely morning, and it was to be followed by a super-hellish afternoon. The problem is that we attempted to drive the mini-van into the center of Rome, to get to our hotel. I'm not sure who thought this was a good plan, but I certainly didn't veto it, and I didn't quite realize what we were in for. I was the main navigator at the very end, and I literally steered the car to within a block of the hotel, but that block or so was frustratingly far away from our hotel. Let me repeat that: we were within a block or so of our hotel, but could NOT get the car to the front of it to unload the luggage. We ended up, and I am not kidding you, driving 45 minutes out to the airport to drop off the rental car and taking a van back to the hotel with all the luggage. It was a LONG, long experience, and it made us all testy, tired, and hungry.
I was pretty much just happy to be in Rome, and every minute felt pretty good. We walked by some old landmarks--the classroom building! Pascucci! and then past one of the places I spent the most time in while studying in Rome. A cafe called Brek. It was closed, and it was clearly closed permanently. I can't describe how that felt, but it wasn't good.
Then we ate at Giolitti, another disturbing occurence, because it started out a chain of days where we ate Giolitti twice a day. Did I mention that I've gained five pounds?
Phew. I'll go into days 4, 5 and 6 tomorrow. Day 5 is a REAL doozy. It's worth reading, I assure you.
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