Day 10 – Monday, December 28, 2009 – Drive from Rome to Florence

March 13, 2010

Woke up and had a good breakfast at the hotel. We ended up leaving around 11:00 am from the hotel. Based on the recommendation of one of our friends at the hotel, we stopped at the town of Orvieto. This is a beautiful mountain town between Rome and Florence. It is known for it’s olive oil and for porcelain. We had lunch in Orvieto and Gabriel (and Kallie) ice skated for the first time (I can hear the conversations now… when did you first ice skate? Well, let’s see, it was in a mountain village in central Italy called Orvieto…). Katie was pretty tired on this day so we didn’t dally.

We made it into Florence late… around 8:30 pm. It was tough finding our hotel again, and we were also greeted by the wonderful surprise of Florence traffic. Later, the hostess at the hotel remarked, “if you can drive in Florence, you can drive anywhere in the world”. She might be right. There are no rules, no lines, and it is every person for themselves! I learned the pace of the road and began to fit in nicely. I made Katie start calling me Giovanni…

Katie was super-tired when we got to the hotel, and I ran out and got some chicken (kip) sandwiches from the deli next to our hotel. Our hotel, by the way, was super-duper retro from the 60’s… wow… I mean, groovy. It was the kids’ favorite room out of our whole trip. They loved it. Anyway, I brought the chicken sandwiches back to the hotel only to realize that they weren’t cooked / warmed up! So, I convinced the hostess lady to let us use the hotel kitchen. Problem solved.

Random: Ok, Italy officially has the dirtiest, stinkiest bathrooms in civilized Europe.