Posts (page 3)

PLEASE NOTE: We are constantly adding updates to the text of the trip report as we go along, and then much later we come back and add interesting color comments (if I do say so myself), links, and pictures. Please don't forget to wind your way backwards in time into the blog to enjoy or hate these pieces of personal history.

IF YOU WANT TO START WITH THE EARLIER ENTRIES, use these
links to help you navigate those older pages more easily!

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Keep in mind that the contents of these pages change as I add more at the beginning...

David

Hi All,

Well, we've reached our last night.

Here's what I haven't caught you up to yet:

• the rest of the Tuscany week
• the trip back to Florence to return the car, then hit our train to Cinque Terre
• Cinque Terre
• trip from Cinque Terre to Villefranche-sur-mer (Nice)
• Villefranche-sur-mer
• trip to Paris
• eight wonderful days in Paris

I hope to finish the text parts in the next few days, once I'm home, then work on catching up with the photos, vids, links, etc.

Anyone/Everyone feel free to call us as you like next week... give us Sunday to get things unpacked and then find a good cheeseburger.

So, tonight is the last night, and all day Saturday we fly home - we arrive at around midnight Saturday, Austin time.

Talk to all of you soon,

David and Lindi Smith

Got up in our new locale, and Lindi made us breakfast. The staff of the Le Manzanaie provided us with a refrigerator full of good stuff, including: orange juice, milk, butter, fizzie and non-fizzie water, eggs, and some wonderful prosciutto; in addition to the normal things in a bed-and-breakfast-style kitchen such as herbs, sugar, honey and all such, they also provided coffee (and a coffee pot), a bottle of wine and a nice mini-loaf of bread. Appliances span the normal requirements, including microwave oven, regular cooktop and oven, coffee-pot, and refrigerator… wonderful! We had eggs, toast, juice and coffee. We vowed to go later to the grocery and get some more food, and we did so.

David worked for quite a while on the blog, and Lindi read a bit more on the area, planning places to see and things to do.

We bugged out finally, looking for Cortona. This is a lovely hill-top city, on a beautiful drive. Get ready, dear reader: nearly all the cities in Toscana and Umbria are hill-top located and the drive to them all is beautiful. I fully expect the next five days entries to look very similar indeed, with the various descriptions of towns blending together. We learned that this town, like so many others, was situated on the top of a hill to allow a view of the countryside, as a protective measure in the middle-ages and before.

We parked at what looked like the highest parking place we could, as Cortona is a very steep hill with a town at or near the top. Like a lot of Italian (and French) small towns, the town was originally inside a protective wall erected to keep the townspeople safe. We were unaware of just how steep the climb would really be. We reached the city centre area quite tired, but one more problem had been encountered: Lindi had started sneezing. It appears that something in the air was setting her off seriously.

We decided to push on to the Church of Santa Margharita, and regretted it the entire way up. First, it got steeper; a lot steeper – to my estimation it was at least a 20% grade (1 foot up for every 5 feet in length). Second, the footing changed from flat to cobblestone ramps and stairs. Last, Lindi’s allergy got a lot worse… she literally was unable to stop sneezing as we reached the top. What was the capper? There is a road we didn’t notice before that allowed cars access to the very top at the church – doh!

We checked out the view, which was very nice, and then started back down. It was actually harder than you would think to descend. We worked our way back to the centre and stopped at a small place for a few pieces of pizza, which weren’t very good. We had missed the lunch period (of about 12:30 – 2pm) and all the restaurants/trattorias/cafés had closed… again: doh!

Once we made it back to the car, we decided to drive to a nearby lake, Lake Trasimene (called Lago Trasimeno). This lake and it’s environs are actually in Umbria, and not Tuscany, but that’s OK with us. Castigliano del Lago is a town on the lake and we decided to drive by or through it to see if it was organized for tourists. As we got fairly close, it was obvious that Lindi was still having problems with her allergies, so we decided to cut off our wandering and start heading back. We drove over the hills back to our area, and David stopped several times to take pictures of the various lovely views, ancient houses, and farms/vineyards.

We hadn’t realized that a local town (Valiano) was having a festival where locals compete with each other in what they call go-karts, but really are unpowered wagons – much like large versions of Pinewood Derby cars. Because of this festival, the one road leading from our area (near Montepulciano Stazzione) was blocked for the go-kart run. Hilarious. Now we had to backtrack at least 20km to get home, the other way. We got turned around and confused a few times, but finally got back around 17.30.

We popped out for an early dinner, with both of us tired and Lindi still suffering a bit from the allergy attack at Cortona – remember that in Italy early means before 20.30 (8:30pm). So, at around 19.15 we showed up at a local place recommended more for value and closeness, and less for quality. It is called De Renata Ristorante, and I actually liked it more than I thought I would, although Lindi gives it lower marks. The food was very inexpensive compared to nearly all the other places we’d been in Europe – five to six Euros for pizzas, which were greater than plate size. All the pizzas we saw in Italy were wood-fired real pizza ovens, which was nice.

We hobbled back to the Le Manzanaie, full but tired and ready for some rest.The travel from the day before had taken a larger toll than we thought but as is characteristic for the entire trip, we didn’t let it stop us or slow us down much. We dispatched day 23 a bit early, but happily.

PLEASE NOTE: I am constantly adding updates to the text of the trip as I go along, and then (I apologize, but) much later I come back and add interesting color comments (if I do say so myself), links, and pictures. Please don't forget to wind your way backwards in time into the blog to enjoy or hate these pieces of personal history.

Here are a few links to help you navigate the older pages more easily!
Page 2      Page 3      Page 4      Page 5      Page 6

Keep in mind that the contents of these pages change as I add more at the beginning...

David

We awoke to our last day in Florence, and our last in the Hotel David. We knew that we’d not have internet connections for the next seven (and perhaps as long as ten) days, so we’d wrapped up any open emails and such in readiness for our country stay. We went down for a nice final breakfast, came back up to finish packing, then checked out of the hotel, leaving our bags with the front desk. Since we weren’t picking up our rental car until the afternoon, we still had lots of time to sightsee. We made our way out to the “D” bus (for travel along the river) and got off at the Ponte Vecchio.
Here’s where it gets a little weird; we’ve always known to be careful of our surroundings and our belongings, and we use the security features we’ve brought with us, including zippered and hidden pockets in special ‘travel’ pants, hidden money belts, and we are always careful with our backpacks and especially my camera backpack. But on this morning, pickpockets/thieves were furthest from our minds – it was early morning, and things were crowded at all in this area. And yet, Lindi saw a guy, out of the corner of her view, that was following us very closely. I had just stopped to take a picture and she noticed him, then turned and loudly began talking to me and turning in all directions to survey our surroundings. This all happened right on the walkway along the river on the ‘town side’ of the river and right next to the Pont Vecchio. A quick dart of the eyes to me told all, and we looked at this guy – he immediately changed directions and started zig-zagging between the posts and columns in this area and effectively disappeared. Lindi noticed he wasn’t carrying anything, such as going to work or sightseeing, etc. We might have dodged a bullet at that point, or maybe not. Guess we’ll never know. Lindi says she was ready with a sidekick and an arm-chop – maybe he dodged a bullet.

Today was the day to see the Uffizzi. This is a major museum for Roman and Italian sculptures, and paintings. There are so many things to see here, and we recommend it over the Accedemia. Again we noticed that so many people don’t know about making reservations at these sites, and then getting in quicker. This particular reservation was for a specific time, making it even easier to set your schedule – always call for a reservation. The reservation line was short, and the public line was very long and hadn’t even started to enter as we went in. It is good to go to every room here, and see all the different stuff – I even liked the amazing sculptures along the hallways and the ceilings. I’ll try and put some pictures on here, but we really were strongly discouraged from taking photos so I don’t have very many. The Uffizzi is based on a collection owned and started by the Medici family over 400+ years, and features paintings by Michelangelo, Botticelli, and many others. It took us over two hours to get through all the great stuff there. I brought home a great illustrated guide to the Uffizzi for those of you who are close by to look at, when we get back home.

We walked back to the Santa Croce Piazza and stopped for a Gelato. Lindi and I have noticed that gelato is good stuff, but that it is about the same as custard-based or very thick creamy ice-cream – we aren’t sure we could tell a good one from a bad. Some unique flavors are featured, and certainly the number of points of sale and the variety of flavors isn’t normal for the USA.

Lindi had a hankerin’ for some leather goods, and had read that a leather school was accessible from the Santa Croce Cathedral. It wouldn’t have been a bad walkthrough, but the line outside was ridiculous (and no reservations), so we decided to skip it and perhaps check some of the local leather shops – this obviously isn’t as good, as you can never know where the product is really made. Fakes abound. So, we started to wander to the side of the church, looking, and it occurred to us that perhaps the leather school might have a rear exit or some other entrance we could go into. We walked the side and the rear, where the nice gardens were, and… voila; there was the school. We went inside and found that handmade products guaranteed to be from Italy are not cheap! Lindi couldn’t really find anything of the size that she wanted and everything was three to five times more expensive than we thought was reasonable, but we don’t really shop ‘expensive Italian leather’ goods. At one point we ran across men’s leather coats and I have needed a replacement for quite a while. There were a few 50% off coats that were ostensibly from last year, that didn’t look stitched quite as elaborately, but were still absolutely handsome. We decided to get it (grin). Sad for Lindi and great for me.

We then walked back into Santa Croce square – this is a lovely large square and has lots of vendors selling leather, souvenirs, and paintings. Lindi found a nice leather purse and we fell in love with one of the water-color paintings we saw. All this stuff will be an issue later, in how we get it back home, but we didn’t worry about that.

We slowly wandered back toward the hotel to get our luggage and make our way to the rental car company. Since we had all the bags, we called a taxi. The ride was uneventful, but like all taxis here it was expensive. Both Italy and France add a charge for each bag as well as the time of the ride.

As we got out of the taxi we noticed that the Europcar rental place was mobbed! Tons of people and it’s so wildly wedged into a very thin city street that we didn’t see how it even worked at all! Cars coming and going, and a huge line in the front. Keep in mind it was Saturday afternoon, so at least the work traffic wasn’t going at that time. The office, like many of the others we’ve seen, was highly unorganized and badly run. We waited 30 minutes to get our car, and it was clear after we took off that they hadn’t checked the gas tank or cleaned the car at all. I made sure before I left the office to get everything I needed for the drive out, and back. This included all the available maps and instructions on how to get out of town and then (especially) back into the crazy weird office location. We followed the instructions to leave and made our way to the A1 road, to go toward the area we would stay for the next week. We noted, as we left Florence, that Italian roads are worse that French ones; no signs with road numbers at all, that we could tell. To get somewhere, you just use the signs (when they are there) that have the town name of the place you want (or one close by) – that’s all you get. This, you will learn later, made negotiating roads very hard, even with a map. Most of this pain fell on Lindi, as the navigator – I drove, mostly because I can drive a standard and nearly all cars here are standard shift.

Once we got up on the A1 Tollway, everything was quick to the Montepulciano area. We noted that Italians tailgate much worse than even the French, and that Tuscany is even prettier than the pictures show. The Europeans all do freeway service better than in the US, with gas stations and eateries directly off the highway on their own exits and entrances, and we used one of these known as AutoGrill. We saw at least one AutoGrill facility which spanned the highway as a single ‘bridge’ building where both sides can enter, and as you drive under you can see people sitting at tables directly above you. Hilarious.

You may recall the whole cell/mobile phone debacle, where I had purposely bought a ‘world-SIM’ that would supposedly work in my Mom’s little Ericsson GSM phone and it didn’t work at all. Once that SIM was determined to be crap, I bought a Vodaphone SIM in the UK and put 5 pounds value in it. Well, between just a few calls we used up all that value and I needed to recharge the account – problem was that I couldn’t find any Vodaphone offices anywhere in France or Italy where I’d already been, and was getting a little nervous. Out of all the big cities we’d wandered we’d had no luck – then, as we drove off the A1 and into some really small Toscano town (Gracciano), I spy a Vodaphone office! I turn around and go back with very little hope, considering it’s Saturday, and it was after 5pm. Turns out, it was open and there were a few folks in there. I waited 15 minutes to be served, and then was faced with an Italian woman with very little English skills, but she was trying very hard. In walks a very nice kid who speaks pretty good English and explains my interest. The lady hands me a regular Vodaphone 10 pound ‘calling card’, which supposedly will work. No way, I think… she doesn’t even know what she has, much less what I need. On the outside chance that she’s right, I go ahead and get it, but again with very little hope.

We follow the instructions given us over the internet by the owner of our Toscana farm stay (sometimes called an agroturismo – this one turned out to not be a farm at all, unlike what I’d told a few folks prior to the trip) and we made it just fine. The place is called Le Manzanaie, and is technically a bed and breakfast, but it’s definitely in the middle of nowhere. Actually, France and Italy both have very little ‘nowhere’ left, that we could tell… as all the little towns just blend into one another with very little empty left between. The house was closer to the local road than we thought it would be, but the whole thing was very quiet indeed. We arrived and met the whole family: Father Fiore, Mother Marcia, and daughter Alicia (20) who really seems to handle the guests, English conversations with guests and the internet. She speaks Italian, French, and English, and is very nice and sweet. They showed us around the grounds, helped us move our bags in, and then asked us what we wanted to drink! My kind of place! Every day at happy hour they repeated this process, and we enjoyed it. We liked the apartment – it’s very well appointed, pretty large and was reasonably decorated. It consisted of a nice bathroom with whirlpool tub, a bedroom with several storage places including a huge armoire, and a dining room/kitchen area with a couch, dining table, and a mini-kitchen.

The bid downside was no internet access, but we knew this going in. Also, we noted that conservation of power is so strongly implemented that all the lights were underpowered fluorescent lights, and we couldn’t really see much of anything in the room, especially at night. Further, in an  attempt to cut power (and costs, I’m sure) a special key is used to turn on all the power in the apartment, and it’s directly attached to the house key for the room – so, if you want to leave and lock the door, you have to remove the power key, which kills all the lights, etc. The only problem with this? I have a set of gadgets (media player, computer, cell phone, camera battery chargers, etc.) that need access to power, and it would be most convenient to power or charge these devices while we are out visiting the local area. This was disappointing. The upsides are the location, the facility and the fantastic owners. They really understood how to help us, give us data on the locale and answer all our weird questions.

Once we settled in and unpacked and cleaned up, we decided to head out to one of the recommended local restaurants, L’Angelo, in Acquaviva. We loved the name of this town, which was close to where we were staying… it sounds like Aqua Velva and we kept singing that “there’s something about an Aqua Velva town”. Silly. We went up to the door, and went in… we waited 10 or 12 minutes, then the main waiter (owner?) waived us to a table for two. A few minutes later, he seemed to be concerned that we didn’t have a reservation! Whaaa? Why did you seat us? A few minutes later he said that everything was OK (tutto bene) and we got menus and such. It was clear we were some of the few non-Italians in the place, and we didn’t mind at all. The place turned out to be very affordable (comparatively), but had a very elegant feel without being stuffy. The food was awesome, especially for the cost. The pizzas (everyplace has pizzas it seems) were huge. We ended with a bottle of Avignonese Vino de Nobile Montepulciano, made very near where we stayed – we later visited the winery. Good stuff.

We drove back to the place and crashed.