getting to spend more time in our favorite place

Ponte Vechhio.
Breathtaking.

Okay, I'm back. Things at work have been going a mile a minute since the new year and that is when I normally do all of my writing. (Computer time at home is for online shopping and Pinterest, of course.) So back to vacation...the day after my birthday we went to Florence (which is Firenze in Italian - that little fun fact confused a lot of people in our party). Florence was breathtaking and my favorite place we visited. I liked it collectively as a whole; the colors were calming, it was very clean, and Italian was spoken over English. We met up with a tour guide when we arrived, which was quite nice. She showed us main attractions and more off-the-beaten-path attractions we would have otherwise passed by. It was very difficult leaving Florence for my husband and I. Although we had an amazing tour, we felt like we wanted to spend days upon days walking around, but once lunch (which was covered in truffles!!) was finished we had plans to break off from the family and experience the Italian countryside on a vineyard and olive farm in Chianti - a thought so peaceful and calming, until we started driving there in our rental car...our manual rental car (aka not automatic).

We opted not to rent a GPS with our car because my husband had a foreign plan on his phone and that combined with taking screen shots of needed routes and watching the blue dot in Google Maps seemed like enough. What I didn't realize was that because we were offline, the blue dot was not as accurate as it normally is when one is connected to a 4G or LTE network. This became quite an issue when approaching a fork and having to make a split decision on where to go without any warning. Needless to say, I made a lot of wrong split decisions and interstates in Italy have minimal exits. After finally getting on the right path and realizing directions with words were much easier to follow than a delayed blue dot, we got closer and closer to our destination. At one part of the drive my husband and driver of the vehicle briefly mentioned his concern for driving a car of that type up hills. I thought nothing of it 1. because I have faith in him and 2. I can't drive a standard for anything and could only offer positive words and cheering on. To make a very long and very stressful story short, we had a lot of trouble getting up the massive three mile hill that led us to our accommodation. When we finally made it (which I honestly did not think was ever going to happen), we realized we could not leave because if we went back down the hill we would have to come back up the hill. So, we drank three bottles of wine for dinner, slept like babies, and decided to end our Chianti adventure the following morning and return to Florence. Moral of the story: rent automatics.