Travels in Tuscany

We knew driving in Italy might be a challenge.

The young woman who rented us our little fiat gave us her personal email address, ostensibly because  she wanted to hear about our trip~ or perhaps she had a perverse sense of humour and could tell how clueless we were at the counter with our paper map and false confidence. When we got in the car I pulled down the sun visor and said “is that blood?!” at the big red stain smeared across it. We howled with laughter. “This is the adventure part of our trip,” we decided as we pulled out into heavy rush hour traffic with the loose instructions of ‘go left’ and ‘follow signs for Castellina.’

I’m not going to tell you how often we got honked at for going too slow or how many times we drove down tiny winding streets barely wide enough for a car. Sandy is a trooper for taking on the driving but I’m afraid she’s used to a much better navigator than me, as evidenced by her habit of cheerily calling out road names and numbers I was meant to find on this paper map that we soon discovered contained only very main highways. I contributed nothing: “Maybe that way?” I ventured, repeatedly getting us even more lost, until the sun started to set and we were two women in the middle of nowhere with no phone service and blood on our sun visor, accosting the few strangers we could find in this tiny dark town, begging for directions.

Everyone tried to help. All the Italian I’d been learning on my duolingo phone app got me nowhere with what they said though. All I could recall in Italian were words like boy, girl, apple, sugar. Well where the appley, sugary hell were we? One man adorably mimed diving into a pool, I think to tell us the road went downhill. Or maybe he was suggesting we plunge off a cliff to our deaths since we were clearly never going to find our villa.

In the end we made it with the help of  two kind restaurant servers who googled it for us. It was the only lit building in the whole town. They offered to make us coffee - maybe they could tell we’d been awake for more than 30 hours and were a little stressed and ready to sleep in the car? Turns out we were only 6 minutes away and had been driving back and forth nearby in the dark for, well, forever.

But in the morning, we got to eat breakfast here: