March 14, 2019
Not too many photos on this first day.
Our 8.5 hour flight from New York arrived in Malpensa (near Milan) before 6:00 AM (Italy time). Neither Edith or I had managed to sleep on the flight. The fight arrived a bit ahead of schedule and we had sit on the plane and wait for the customs officials to show up for work. When they did arrive, all they did was stamp our passports. Welcome to Italy.
We then trekked to the local train station and bought tickets for Florence. The package Edith had bought included our flights from and to New York, five days in Tuscany and a rental car to be picked up in Florence.
We had some negotiations with the car rental people on how much coverage we needed. We bought extra but shortened the rental term to three days from six. We were both nervous about driving in Italy and decided to minimize use of the car.
Our first foray out of the rental company was like something in a bad comedy movie. We headed west without using any navigation aids, encountered our first traffic circle and found ourselves back near the rental company. The drivers were very aggressive, and street signs were all on the sides of buildings, blending in nicely with the exteriors.
We made our next try using the IPhone for navigating and made our way west. Our first encounter with a toll booth was also quite humorous. We made it to Montecatini and eventually located our hotel. We had to surrender our car keys and passports on check-in which seemed a bit extreme. They did keep them in a safe.
We went out to find something to eat and I took a few photos of the surroundings. The first restaurant we saw was called New York, a little ironic given our travel itinerary yesterday.
While writing this post, I tried really hard to find out what this building is but was not successful. It looks old and historical.
This caught my eye due to the mix of colours.
And this one is just impressive:
And finally, a bird photo. When i first saw these birds I assumed they were some variation on a Starling. It wasn't until halfway though our vacation that I did the research and found that this is a male Eurasian Blackbird, the type sung about by Paul on the Beatles White album.
It's not related to the North American blackbird species, the Eurasian is actually a member of the Thrush family. This is #6 on my World list of birds, the first five were seen in France in 2009.
We stayed awake as long as we could, but were both sleeping before 8:00 PM local time. It would take a couple of days to adjust.
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