Walking Backwards

I'm awake in a quiet household (for now) so we'll see how far I get on my travel saga before Nicholas declares that he's awake and makes me play playdough with him in our darkened playroom.

First, the trip over wasn't easy. Despite what some may think, entertaining a three year-old on that long of a plane ride is an arduous task by myself. Especially when your sitting in a row that is far removed from the nearest powerport thereby making the DVD player you brought totally useless. We played games, we read books, we colored, we used up every thing in my bag of tricks. He only slept for two hours on the trans-Atlantic leg and I felt so guilty getting him up to transfer planes. He was good, though. Very few times did I have to pretend he was just a stray child belonging to some unknown other passenger. My brother read the whole time. Asshole.

So, after we land in Pisa we hop a train to Florence which is a little over an hour away because of all of the stops. I performed the amazing feat of changing Nico on the moving and swaying seat (we decided this wasn't the best time to continue with the militant potty training) and learned a valuable lesson about the Italian train systems: for the love of GOD validate your ticket before you get on the train. Apparently you have to punch your ticket in one of the little yellow boxes by the platform which stamps it with the date and time and location. It is a 40€ fine if you don't. The conductor took pity on us and didn't charge us, but I felt that wave of "oh crap, not something else".

When we arrived in Florence we had to wait for a taxi to go to the car rental place. A task made all the more difficult by Nicholas who kept trying to run away to explore and chase pigeons. I can't blame him; by that time I was ready to give up on any future traveling and just live at the Florence train station (which is unbelievably dirty, so this is saying a lot). The taxi eventually got us and drove through the Florence streets to the car rental place. This was our first experience with the wonders of Italian driving. First of all, there are very few traffic laws and those rules that do exist do not have to be followed by the ten thousand scooters that are buzzing around. We almost lost our lives about a dozen times in that ten minute ride. But it was only almost.

We pick up the rental car and I get to drive on these streets that are crazy and dangerous and I haven't had any sleep and I have no idea where I'm going. Yay! The reason I have no idea where I'm going is because Italian street signs are not helpful to someone who has not been to Italy or thoroughly studied an Italian map because they don't use street names or numbers (which all our travel maps had), they use directions of cities to get you places. Turn here to reach Sienna, Turn here to go back to Pisa, Turn here to reach a number of cities that no person has ever heard of and that don't exist on the map. Our city was not on the sign. We did find it two hours later by pure chance.

We find the villa and go downstairs to sign the paperwork and give them the deposit. A task made all the more difficult because we don't speak Italian and their English, while far better than our Italian, came up short of fluency. But we did it, we got the villa keys and drug our luggage inside the huge house. Now, if we were lucky this would be the end of our travels, but we are not lucky people. After situating our luggage so that it could have a nice and comfortable rest, we turned around to drive back to Florence to pick up my mother who was landing at the airport. We left over an hour early because we were guaranteed to get lost, which we did. I had to pull over to throw-up a few times because my body was trying to think of anything that it could do to get me to go to bed. But we found the airport and managed to get there twenty minutes before my mom landed. She drove home.

So that was our trip there. I'm going to find myself some tea now and start yet another load of laundry. More later today with pictures (my sleeping brother has the laptop in his room). I promise not to be so long-winded with the rest of my entries, it's just that the memory my first day will be burned into my brain for the rest of my existence as proof of what I am capable of surviving.