Packed, double checked the apartment, sent some folks downstairs with one of the keys to open the outer door (key lock on both sides) and hold it open, then brought the key back upstairs so we could leave them all behind. Get the sequence wrong and you'd be locked in the stairwell. Short walk with suitcases to the Vaporetto, still within the validity of our 24-hour tickets. A bargain! Rode to the end of the line where the transportation hub is located. Boat, bus, train, and car all come together there. Two rental cars awaited us at Avis. No hassle. K&D&C got the standard shift and B&SA got the automatic. More on that later.
Turned on GPS and it successfully got us out of town and onto the Autostrada. Our GPS is of European manufacture (TomTom) and we've acquired some optional silly voices beyond those generic ones that came with it. “Tony Blair” was uninspiring. We feared that “George Bush” might just keep telling us to turn right. John Cleese (the real one) was fun but not too intelligible in the face of road noise. But the voice of “the Queen” was just right, so we were quite willing to follow her commands.
Except for one construction area, traffic moved along quite well. We generally drove about 120 km/hr (75 MPH), which seemed to be pretty much the normal speed. Nice lunch at a roadside restaurant. Terrain was rather flat for a while and then became extremely hilly. There was a long stretch north of Florence where it seemed that we were always on either a high bridge (across an entire valley) or in a tunnel. Nothing in between.
We got off the Autostrada after Florence. Toll was €14, not cheap but we wouldn’t have been surprised had it been even more. Somebody has to pay for all those tunnels. And the machine took Visa, so it was OK. The Queen did make one mistake that briefly sent us the wrong way after we had gotten off onto regular roads, but she immediately commanded a U-turn and we obeyed. She then guided us through a number of obscure turns on narrow mountain roads with sweeping views of vineyards and olive groves, through downtown Radda, and straight to 14 Via Aldo Moro. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the home of the owner of the place we had rented, not the place itself. (‘Garbage in, garbage out’ as we say in the trade.) The place itself was somewhere out of town and went only by its name, not by an address.
So we then referred to the notes we had taken from the printed directions and found that we had missed out on some of the necessary fine details. We drove through the town a few times, and back out of town as many times. Turn around places were rare and often dangerous. It was then that we discovered the peculiar aspects of our automatic transmission. No simple PRNDL lever on this car, but something with a plus sign and a minus sign, connected to a computer and a digital readout. Sometimes it decided to shift into neutral and tell me to press the brake pedal a few times before going back into gear. One time this happened while our tail was still sticking out into the road in the midst of a U-turn. (Other things we say in the trade are, “It takes a computer to screw something up really big.” and “Engineering for the sake of engineering.” Both seem to apply here.)
The best landmark in the directions was a particular gas station. We found it. Figured we'd ask directions there, but it was totally self-service. So much so that they even had a self-service lift for DIY oil changes and other underneath maintenance! Then Sue Anne spotted a Carabinieri car stopped nearby, so we went over to see if they could help. One piece of information in our directions caught their attention, so they motioned, “Follow me.” Within a minute or two we were pulling into our driveway with a police escort, to the amusement of our companions from the other car who had been there for a while already. (They later confessed to having gotten ‘a teeny bit lost’ themselves, and attributed much of their earlier arrival to a shorter lunch stop.) We figured it was better to arrive following the police than to have them following us into the driveway in hot pursuit.
We rested up for a bit, and then Sue Anne, Cathy, and Bruce headed back into town on foot. Narrow road, no sidewalk, and cactus, yucca, and a drainage ditch in stretches along the side, so it was a pretty tight squeeze with no escape. The ladies got food for dinner while Bruce checked e-mail and published the blog for yesterday in Venice.
Dinner of pasta and wine.
The place we’re staying in is absolutely gorgeous. It was described as a farmhouse, but we’d call it a villa. Fully modernized. Many channels on TV, mostly in German but CNN in English. Beautiful views in all directions. We had learned that new construction is banned in the scenic areas, but it’s OK to tear down and rebuild tastefully on the same footprint. We figure that's what probably happened here. It was too dark to take pictures by the time we got back from town, but we’ll take some tomorrow before we post this.
Later: It's now ‘tomorrow.’ Here are the pix.
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