Today both Americans and Italians write the date the same way.
Dark, rainy skies greeted us when we woke up this morning. As a result, the goodbyes to our new friends at Cretaoile were brief. I brought our leftover food to Sharon and Giacomo who are staying in a house in Orvieto this coming week. The only thing we kept was the olive oil and the chocolate bar.
Driving from Pienza to Nettuno in the pouring rain was stressful for me - and I wasn't the driver. You know how I hate walking downhill? I'd rather walk downhill than drive or be a passenger in the rain.I'm not sure which route we actually took here but it was raining nearly the entire way. There are two different types of payment on the autostrada. Sometimes on one type of pavement, the visibility was drastically reduced. Some drivers do slow down in the rain but some just keep zooming along. The speed in the fast lane is pretty intense, rain or shine. The tailgating and lane switching is quite different from home.
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| We took one of these routes, not sure which |
A highlight of autostrada travel is the rest areas. Today we each had a small sandwich and an espresso. A visit to the very clean toilettes and we were back on the road.
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| My vegetarian sandwich on the right |
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| I think this is what Luigi ate |
That's when the craziest thing happened. We'd gone to pay the toll before pulling off at the rest area. Our card was unreadable. A live person from somewhere starts yelling at us from a speaker next to the machine where you insert you entry card and pay your toll. Eventually we realized he was asking us where we got on. I navigate, Lou drives. He wasn't even sure where we'd gotten on. I have no idea if the "toll man" understood that we got on the A1 in Chiusi. Our toll was over €10 which seemed a bit excessive. That's not even the crazy part. We exited from the rest area (always through a store, just like a Disney ride), walked through the parking lot in the pouring rain, got in the car, and got back in the road. TomTom had us exit shortly after and then do something like a u-turn on a rotary. Rotaries were everywhere when we were here five years ago, too. We approach the highway and see a toll barrier. I realized sooner than Lou that this was an exit barrier, not an entrance barrier. And we had no ticket. We'd already paid! What road did they think we were getting off of anyway? At my suggestion, Lou pressed the help button. We heard some muffled voice come through the speaker. Lou was trying to explain that we'd already paid. We couldn't tell what the person on the other side was saying. Lou started cursing, I started yelling and then I heard, "Arriverderci." I saw the gate go up and off we went.
It was still raining when we arrived in Nettuno but it looked like the sun was trying to come out.
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| The view from our room |
The rain slowed to a drizzle and then stopped so we went out for a walk. There's a small ancient fort - or something like that - right on the water so we walked over there. Compared to the charming walled cities we've explored during the past week, this one seemed rather tired. Unkempt properties with lots of graffiti, something we hadn't seen at all up north. Many properties for sale. And many businesses closed. The latter could be because this is a beach resort and the season is over. It's hard to tell. It was too early for dinner, even by our American standards, so we returned to our hotel. Lou is napping and I'm blogging. We'll go out for dinner at a proper Italian time, probably around 7:30. The parking situation is a bit tight around here so we'll probably just walk to the restaurant across the street. (The hotel has space for 4 to 5 cars on the street outside. I'm not sure how they keep track of who is parked there. The rest of the street has muni-meter parking. In October, it's from 9-13 and 16-20. If we move the car to have dinner, not only will we probably have to pay to park until 10pm, but most likely we'll need to be up by 9am to pay to park again. It's just easier to leave the car and settle for what's close.)
Unless something blog worthy happens at dinner, this will be all for today.
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