Our Dumb Blog

Nov. 16 (Friday)

Autostrataing

In the morning, it seemed high time to head North and find the Alps. Though the memory of the cold night at the campground had just started to fade, the bruises from sleeping on the rocks had not. If we’d had our thermarest pads, I think it would have made all the difference in the world. But the ground was cold and rocky, so we thought we’d try to find cheap beds for the night. We elected to do our first real travel on the autostrada (like our interstates), which we’d avoided so far for a couple of reasons. The first being that they are all toll roads, and in our original estimation, we thought they’d be very expensive, though it turned out not to be too bad. The second reason is that we wanted to see the countryside. And the third, big reason, was that Berck wanted to drive on the fun, small roads. But we wanted to make some progress, and we could only average 30km/hr on the small roads, with all the curves, roundabouts, and stops.

Last time Berck was in Italy, he mostly remembered the Autostrada routes as being 4-lane, but most of the roads we drove on were 3, sometimes even 4 lanes per side. Such large, wide and generally well-paved roads seemed somewhat out of place with the general Italian character– but before we get too cozy describing them to our Interstates, I should point out that they are very much not. Where as a car on the interstate takes up barely 2/3 of a lane, the Italian lanes are just wide enough for a car, and there’s not really much wiggle room. There is no median– merely a small concrete divider, and there is no shoulder on either side of the road. I suspect that a breakdown or flat tire is very dangerous, since you’d simply have to stop in an actual lane of traffic. The signs are quite cryptic, even with our guidebook helping to decipher some of them. The lane markings are sometimes white, sometimes yellow, sometimes solid, and sometimes dashed. Sometimes double solid and/or double dashed. In general, there seemed to be little standardization, merely the construction crew’s mood. I experimented with different speeds. Even while driving at the top speed of our little Sirloin (about 160 km/hr on level ground), German-made BMW’s would fly by me. Attempts to pass other cars often resulted in four giant circles in my rearview mirror of an Audi about to mow me down. Not wanting to waste petrol (≈$8/gallon) and fearing speed cameras, I tried to stay somewhere around the speed limit, which was rarely posted unless it dropped below the typical speed limit of 110 or 130 km/hr.

The Lakes

So we managed to get out of Modena far less painfully than we got in, just following the green signs to the autostrade. After a couple of hours, we were almost in Switzerland, and decided to exit at the Italian Lakes and see what we could see. The lakes are at the foot of the Italian Alps and are a favorite summer holiday location for much of europe. The towns all had that summer resort feel, with almost all the hotels and much of the other establishments closed for the winter. We enjoyed driving around Lake Maggiore, but it seemed too early to stop. Berck wanted to start looking for an open and hopefully willing to bargain hotel in the Lakes, but Joanna wanted to press ahead to Switzerland. While driving though Como we saw signs about road closures for a rally. We’d have loved to stop and watch a bit of it, but there was no good way to figure out where to go when.

Switzerland

Border control mostly seemed to consist of show, with traffic momentarily slowing down to a crawl and endless uniformed men waved cars on through. With no ceremony, we found ourselves across the border. The language may have been the same, but there was no doubt we were in a different country. The roads suddenly became relatively wide and smooth and well marked. Traffic had a car’s length or two space between vehicles and people seemed to be posting the now oft-posted speed limits. Turn signals were used whenever they might be applicable. We stopped as soon as possible at an ATM and were horrified to find that the Swiss Franc was now worth just over $0.90. Which made everything insanely expensive. We drove by Locarno to Lugano, where one of our guidebooks mentioned a hostel. We had little difficulty locating the town, but as soon as we arrived, traffic simply stopped. The traffic was so bad, we’d spend 15 minutes or so at each stoplight, and it appeared that this was normal for this town. With none of the marked streets matching up with Joanna’s rough map of the town, she found it difficult to navigate, but after a couple hours, we managed to find the correct road to the hostel. Unfortunately, we drove to the end of it without finding the hostel and wound up on the main road again with a half hour wait to get back. This sort of nonsense continued forever, and eventually we pulled off somewhere that happened to have free internet. Berck mucked a bit with the internet while Jonah stared into the dark, it seeming nearly useless for her to continue to look at the same maps that didn’t get us where we needed to go. We eventually went back to the road where the hostel was supposed to be and drove up and down it with no success. We eventually stopped somewhere and Jonah got out to walk around and try to find it. Berck noticed that his laptop was getting free wifi from an SSID with the same name as our hostel, and it was nearly full strength. Joanna came back 10 minutes later and pointed at the building we parked next to and said, “That’s the hostel, and I have no idea how to get in it,” and stormed off again. A long time later, she came back and showed Berck where to park, saying we had a room. It was 75 swiss francs.

In a hostel. That’s $68. And we didn’t get any sheets– they would have been an extra 4 francs/person. Insanely expensive. After checking into the hostel, we discovered it was very Swiss. Built of hardwood and solid fixtures, it seemed like it could withstand nuclear attack. It was extremely clean and pleasant. Our room was on the top floor wedged in where the roof meets the wall, and the only window was in the roof. It swung open to allow us to stick a head through. After doing so, the view was spectacular, the hostel faced the train station below, and the town below that, with a lake below that, then the suburban sprawl climbed the mountain beyond.

We headed into Lugano looking for dinner. The restaurants were indistinguishable from Italian ones, save the fact that they were insanely expensive. We looked in all the window shops at the watches costing more than most cars, the crazy fashions, the meticulously laid out antiques. Berck hates shops, but in general really enjoys Swiss shops. They often sell things that interest him, and they are neat, clean and well organized, in sharp contrast to the average Italian shop. Berck suggested skipping diner, or eating at the only cheap place which was Burger King. (To put prices in perspective, a #1 meal at the burger king was 11.60 CHF or over $10.) We had 25 CHF, and after much discussion decided to get more money and go eat. We took out another 40 CHF, leaving us with 65, which should have been enough for dinner. Berck utilized his remarkable restaurant-picking ability and settled on a place, primarily because it only had 3 antipasto choices, 3 primi piatti, and 3 secondi. Berck’s tip: any place with only 3 things on the menu is bound to be good.

Berck ordered, because while he certainly can’t speak Italian, he can at least approximate the pronunciation, which is better than Joanna generally managed. He got a plate of meat and cheese as an antipasto, and one pasta dish to share. This totaled about 40CHF, which would have been fine, but the trouble came with the wine. Berck ordered some house wine, and the waiter told him how expensive it was. Berck thought he heard “15”, but when all was said and done, it was 35CHF, which put us over the 65 in our pocket, and made for an $80 meal, where we were only able to get wine, an appetizer, and a plate of pasta.

Still, it was excellent. The pasta was taglietelli with mushrooms, the meat and cheese were excellent, and the wine is the only Merlot Berck’s ever really liked. Fortunately, they took credit cards. Joanna said they were the best mushrooms she’s ever had.

Thursday, Nov. 15 (I know because we had to write it on our HI card applications.)

Murlo

We washed a load of clothes last night. We didn’t have enough change for the coin operated washer, so I went back up to the front desk armed with a ten Euro note. The lady wasn’t there anymore, so I rang the bell and waited. There was a button outside that said FOR EMERGENCIES, but not having enough change to wash your clothes didn’t seem all that urgent. No one came, but I could hear someone coughing in the other room watching TV. “Hello?!” I yelled a couple times, but no one came. The door to the office was ajar, so I went in and opened the change drawer, inserted my ten and got a collection of 2’s and 1’s in return. Then we returned to the tent and drank wine and wrote until it was time to put the clothes in the dryer.

The night in the tent was very cold. We hadn’t brought our inflatable sleeping pads, which act as much as insulators as mattresses. We were camped on cold gravel, and it sucked the warmth of our bodies through the thin tent floor, even through our sleeping bags. Finally, I put my jacket under torso and a spare T-shirt beneath my feet to separate them from the ground. Still I would wake up shivering. I always sleep best after the sun comes up and warms up the tent, but Berck told me it was time to arise. My arms were asleep from being curled up tightly around myself in a vain effort to keep warm. Berck said he was cold all night too, and he had the warmest sleeping bag, my extra tall I got on sale. We decided we were ill-prepared wimps and not to camp anymore.

Road from Sienna to Modena

We drove back to Sienna, in the daylight this time, enjoying the beautiful countryside and the curvy road we’d flown by in the dark the night before. We had to navigate around Sienna again but did so successfully this time and took the free “autostrata” (limited access four-lane highway) to Firenze, stopped for some “pizza”-like substances, and continued north on some curvy roads to meet up with a highway to Modena.

The road to Modena was spectacular, and Berck was having fun navigating the curves in our underpowered Dihatsu Sirion (or “Sirloin,” as I call it, which is still a very cute car). We rounded one bend and saw snow-covered Apennines ahead of us. Little did we know that’s where we were going. The road went higher and higher as the temperature dropped lower and lower. Soon there was snow on the side of the road. By the time we got near the pass, snow was covering the road, and we were driving very slowly. But as soon as we’d descended far enough, the snow turned to slush, then to simply wet, and we were on our way again.

Berck stopped again to get us some “lunch,” but it was already 2:24pm, and they were only serving sandwiches, no pizza. We strategized about where to spend the night, deciding to call it day by the time we got to Modena. The problem with navigating by car in Italy is that the map of the country will get you to a city, but the guidebooks only have little maps of the city centers, where all the interesting bits are. Then they’ll list some hostels on the outskirts of town with little arrows pointing down which road out of the city center you should take, but the hotel won’t actually be on that road. They’ll give you a phone number and possibly a website for more information, but that doesn’t help us in the car.

Modena

Modena is a fairly big city, but our best bet for affordable housing for the night was there. Still we were approaching during daylight, so we might have a fighting chance. I studied the maps diligently during the approach, hoping to fill in the gaps between my detailed but limited map of the center and my country map. We tried going straight into town, but we kept being deterred to the right by one-way streets, do-not-enter signs, and bus-only lanes. Soon we were heading out of town again instead of into. We turned around and tried to follow the signs to the center again, but Berck won’t drive into zona traffico limitato areas. Somehow we realized we were at the stadium, which is surrounded by acres of free parking, except, I think, on game days.

We found a spot and walked to the hostel, which was miraculously open. We had to fill out the paperwork to get HI cards, but we get a room to ourselves with clean sheets, a clean bathroom down the hall (our very own in the larger bathroom area with its own key… very strange). We’ve got dorm beds, but I shoved two together. Berck decided it would be worth it to pay to park closer to the hostel, since we only had to pay for the hour or so before parking was free plus two hours in the morning.

We hit the town next, finding an Internet cafe by the main square, where Berck checked e-mail, our flights, and transferred money into checking accounts so we can get it out of bancomats. Then he found us supper at a place nearby recommended by the guidebook, ordering two appetizers, a pasta, and a pizza. Our waiter looked a little confused as he tried to figure out what order he should bring it in. We also has a good bottle of Chianti, and I had a latte for dessert. Delicious. We tried to find some gellato afterward, but everything was closed. So we just went back to the hostel.

Day 5 (It must be; it’s time to do laundry. Nov… who knows, it’s Wednesday.)

We slept in at the Hotel Posta, awakened every quarter hour or so by the bell tower across the courtyard from us and shining into our room. It would give the hour by the number of bells and then a different bell would strike one, two, or three times, indicating which quarter hour had passed. It got hot in the room, so Berck got up and opened the window. Then we were awoken by the sound of pouring rain.

That’s the other thing about touring Italy in November. It rains. It rained pretty much all day. We toured the town with our jackets zipped up and Berck’s umbrella. The duomo is black and white striped. We also paid for the pleasure of walking down St. Patrick’s well and back up, all 496 steps each way. The well has a double helix of steps so that traffic only moves one way. They built the well so that if they ever got seiged they would always have plenty of water. They built it right at the edge of the city wall too so that any invaders would be sure to know they had a well and could outlast any army’s patience. The city was never attacked, probably because of their well-deterrence. What I want to know is, why didn’t they just lower a bucket on a rope?

Cortona

Our parking time was up, so we headed north to Cortona, the city made famous by the book and movie “Under a Tuscan Sun” (though that’s not why we went there). The city is more vertical than horizontal… they make a big deal about the one flat road in town. We arrived at a little before 3, and all of the shops and restaurants had closed at 14:30. All but a bruschetta and birra place, whose owner had apparently figured out that he could make a ton of money serving stupid tourists who want to eat between 14:30 and 19:00. We had an amazing pizza with some salami that was sort of like pepperoni and some brichutta with with truffle paste and prosciuto crudo and some rocket to boot. It was fantastic.

By then it was nearly four, so we hiked to the hostel to see if it were open. The doors were unlocked, and there were kids all around, but the sign at the desk said they were closed until 18.30. Then a kid who had been smoking outdoors came in and said they were actually closed for the season and had just opened to cater to a big group of Americans that had come to town. Stupid HI hostels.

Sienna (attempted)

We got back on the road, after me leading Berck with his hurt heel around the wrong way to the car, and decided to head to Sienna. It had an economical hostel and hotel. It had finally stopped raining, but unfortunately, Sienna is much bigger than Berck remembered it being, and we found that we couldn’t get close to the center where the hotel was with the car. So we tried for the hostel, but it’s outside of town, and the trick is figuring out which road it was on without knowing where the heck you are. Italians put their street names on the sides of buildings at intersections, so you don’t know what street you’ve turned onto until you’re already on it. By now it was night, and we couldn’t even read the street signs.

Traffic was nuts, so Berck was driving very fast trying not to tick anyone off. We kept driving inside the city walls where you’re not supposed to go unless you have a reason to be there into zona traffico limitato areas, but we would come up one way streets that we couldn’t turn around in. These streets are incredibly narrow, usually with stone walls separated by the width of your tiny European car and people walking up and down them. It’s like driving into and around a mall, except there would be more space to drive in a mall. Still Berck only got honked at once when he apparently entered a traffic circle too early. I think it was the third time we’d entered that particular traffic circle.

In desperation, even though I knew it shouldn’t work, I pulled out my compass and said I thought we should go north. Berck said it was more likely pointing at a hunk of metal in the car but would gladly follow it if he turned around and it pointed 180 degrees away. It didn’t.

Finally, I figured out that the hostel was on the same road as the railway station, so we tried to follow signs with trains on them. They led us completely around the city, and then to a roundabout where Berck insisted the train pointed to the right and I insisted a train pointed to the left. No wonder since we were right next to the train station we finally discovered. We still didn’t get on the correct road though, and Berck was ready to give up.

I told him we’d try to find the campsite whose website he’d printed out that was south of Sienna. I told him to follow the signs to Gossetto. That worked for a while, but I have to keep an eye on Berck because sometimes he’ll forget which way he was going in a roundabout and just turn a random direction. Like he did when he saw a sign for hotels. We ended up driving back into Sienna yet again and then back out heading some direction generally south but I couldn’t figure out where until he pulled off in front of a “white” road with some signs marking the towns ahead and figured it out for me. Once I knew where I was, I could get him on the right road for the campground again, and we took some more white roads to get back on track.

Murlo

Once again Berck was led astray by a siren sign promising “camping.” We followed the camping signs as the road got narrower and narrower and were suddenly at a campground. I went up to the lit door, and a woman greeted me in English! “Camping?” I asked. “Yes,” she answered, as if to say, itsn’t that what all the signs say? This is remarkable because as far as we knew, there were only three campgrounds open north of Rome in all of Italy past October.

Not only does it have campsites, it also sports hot showers and washers and dryers. If only it had an Internet connection as well… But we’re relaxing in our tent, taking turns taking slugs off a bottle of wine we bought at the SMA by our hostel in Roma. It’s quite good and only cost 3.50 Euro. It’s so nice to have stopped for the night, even though we’ll be sleeping on a 20.50 Euro bed of gravel tonight in the middle of nowhere. The stars are clear and bright. You can even see the Milky Way. The sky is clear now, but Berck says it looks like a thunderstorm is on its way.

Day 4 (Tues. Nov. 13, Umbria)

Umbria

Today we rented a car at Termini, the big train station in Roma. I always thought Termini was named because it was the end of all the train lines, but it’s apparently named after the ancient baths nearby. Berck, being a better than average American, had made a Thrifty car rental; they were indeed more thrifty than the discount he got with Avis or Hertz. It took about an hour for the clerk to go through all the paperwork. This was after our disastrous discovery that I hadn’t packed the maps of Italy that we’d bought at Borders in Colorado Springs and which Berck had carefully plotted the coordinates of all three Italian campgrounds that were open in winter. I had grabbed the pile of guidebooks and maps from Berck’s desk (I’d wanted to pack them the night before we left, but Berck was still working on them) not realizing there were two maps still on the floor. Berck asked me if I’d gotten all the maps, and I said I’d had, thinking he’d put them all in a pile for me to get. So we ran all over the train station looking for a map of Italy. Finally, we found one in the little bookstore RIGHT ACROSS FROM THE THRIFTY CAR RENTAL. Still, it’s a very good map book, even if it’s all in Italian.

We used it corkscrewing through Umbria today, enjoying the vistas of hilltop towns and hillsides of olive trees, apparently being harvested currently, since wherever we went, there were people spreading nets on the ground around trees and reaching up into the branches with long hooks, plastic crates on the ground nearby at the ready.

As the sun got low in the sky, I decided we would try to spend the night in Amelia, a wonderfully quaint walled town in southern Umbria. We stopped to get gas, and more importantly, use the toilet. This was amusing because it took Berck and the attendant a good minute to figure out where the latch for the gas tank was. I asked the attendant how to get to the piazza where the hostel was. He asked the driver of the truck he was filling, who laughed and shook his head. The attendant ran over to a car that had just arrived and asked the driver, who motioned me over. “Where,” he hesitated in halting English, “are you going?”

“Piazza Mazzini.”

“Who?” he said, and I realized he was wondering what I needed there.

“Hostel,” I said, “Ostello.”

“Ah!” he said.

“Ah!” the gas station attendant said.

“You,” the random guy buying gas said to me, “come with me. I drive you there. But first,” he waived his Euro note at me, indicating he needed to fill up first. We pulled out of the way and waited for him to finish.

“This is way too easy,” said Berck. “Why would he do this for us?” This is the magic of being a traveler. People are much more likely to help out a traveler in need than the guy down the street. And, of course, it helps being a girl.

He led back across the “highway.” Suddenly, we were going up and up steep narrow streets, through city walls, under archways connecting buildings on either side, steeper and narrower until we got to the apex, and the guy in his VW in front of us put on his blinker and continued straight, indicating that we were where he had been leading us. Then he stopped and backed up to make sure we knew we were where we wanted to be. Berck shook his hand as he grinned with his cigarette between his teeth, the joy of a person who has helped a traveler along his path. “This was was too easy,” Berck repeated as we pulled into a parking spot across the street from the piazza that held the hostel.

And it was. The hostel, an HI, was closed from October to April, like so many things in Italy. The weather, however, is perfect, cool and dry. November would be the perfect time to visit, if half the things weren’t closed.

Orvieto

So now we had to figure something else out. We reluctantly left Amelia with its impossibly narrow roads, going down, down, down and got back on the highway, continuing to Orvieto.

Orvieto is nowadays a tourist town, with every shop window a souvenir shop or restaurant. But we got here after dark, and the streets were relatively quiet and empty. Of course, most of the shops selling ceramics were still unnaturally open, spilling their light onto the scalloped cobblestones. We parked in pay parking lot by the Duomo (cathedral) and walked to the Hotel Posta, our guidebook’s recommendation for a good, cheap night’s sleep. Indeed, the hotel is very nice for it’s price being in the middle of a medieval town that seems to exist for tourists alone.

We checked in then retrieved our bags and paid for parking until 10am the next morning. We tried to find two places to eat recommended by our our guidebooks, but one was closed and the other wasn’t there. So we trusted our instincts and wandered up a side street till we found a restaurant with good prices and no English on the menu. Of course, all of the four couples inside were speaking English-plus-“grazie”, but that didn’t stop us from ordering aqua natural, a bottle of Sangiovesa, a plate of cured meats for antipasto misto, two plates of pasta (gnocchi for Berck, “angry” sauce on pasta for me), a secondi (angello cacciatore…I picked it out), another half litre of the house red, and some grappa to finish it off. Then of course, we had to get some gellato. You remember it’s good, but you can never remember just how good it is.

Berck says I should point out that I picked the lamb randomly without knowing what it was. It was still delicious.

Day 3 (Mon., Nov. 12, Roma)

All museums closed

On Mondays all of the museums in Italy close. A lot of restaurants close too. We hadn’t intended to stay in Rome an extra day, but all the flights out on Sunday were pretty full while the ones on Monday were relatively empty. That extended our vacation by a day, and we decided to spend it in Roma rather than Milano.

Foro Romano

Fortunately, you can still walk around the Forum. Berck had already spent untold hours there and not by choice. While I could have spent hours staring at foundations of ancient buildings imagining them fully built, there’s plenty in Rome to see otherwise.

Piazza Campidoglio

On top of Capitoline Hill we admired Michaelangelo’s trapezoidal piazza that he creates an optical illusion within using different colored paving stones to make it appear perfectly square. In the center was a bronze sculpture of Marcus Aurelius that survived being melted down because Christian Rome thought it was Constantine. It was a marvel until the Renaissance because the horse is standing on only three legs. The original is now in a museum and a copy stands outside in the pollution.

Pantheon

Next we went BACK to the Pantheon. On the third try, I finally got to go in it. It’s a remarkable building. The Romans weren’t really sure how to make a complete dome, so they left a hole in the middle of the ceiling. It was turned into a church soon after Christianity was legalized, so it escaped destruction by quarrying. It was a marvel to all of Europe until the Renaissance when mankind figured out how to make domes again.

Piazza Navona

We also walked back through the Piazza Navona and then to Berck’s favorite pizza place. It was still closed, and the hours sign on the door still said that it didn’t open until 18:30.

Berck wanted to visit the contemporary art museums, but of course, it was Monday. We figured out which bus to take to one of them anyhow, but it was indeed closed. We got wireless outside it, though, so Berck checked his e-mail to see if he was supposed to show up for work anytime soon.

Crypt of bones

We were about out of ideas, with all the museums closed, so we went to see the crypt of bones in the basement of a church. It was weird.

Wine

There was still time in the day, but our legs were still aching from the strenuous hike the day before. We were bushed. So we headed back to the hostel. We found out where the nearest grocery store was and walked over and bought three bottles of wine (a Chianti, a 3.50 Euro Malbec, and a bottle of sweet bottle of Est! Est!! Est!!!), a corkscrew, some cheese, and a fresh loaf of bread. Then we borrowed a couple of cups from the kitchen, sat in our little hostel room and watched Top Gear on the laptop while enjoying our bounty. The hostel had free pasta at 7:30, so we got some, but all the seats in the common area were full, so we just went back to the room and drank our second bottle of wine.