Julliette and her balcony
Day 4 "Wherefore Art We? -- The Great Venice to Tuscany Adventure
After our morning breakfast of bread, cheese, and water in our room, we checked out of our hotel and took the Alilaguna public water taxi back to the airport in Venice to pick up our rental car to begin our journey to Tuscany. We have two nights with no reservations and a map.
Our first stop was going to be Padova, but there was nothing there, so we continued on to Fair Varona. We parked in front of a pizza restaurant (free parking!) and had lunch. Great pizza! We were very close to the old walled city and the colluseum, so we walked around the city, until we came upon the statue of Juliette beneath her balcony. The city was bigger than we expected and we did not know that there was a colluseum there. It is used today as a theater. We enjoyed our walk around this charming city.
We found an internet cafe and tried to book a hotel for the night in our next destination, Parma, but the computers were slow, the Hotels.com site kept jumping back into Italian and couldn't tell what I was booking, and finally my 30 minutes of time ended just as I was entering my credit card info. So we just decided to wing it.
The drive to Parma was reminiscent of our walks around Venice -- we felt lost every minute of the way. The roundabouts every kilimeter had confusing signs that pointed every which way (I think the Italians like to mess with the tourists) and we had to back track several times when we realized that we had followed the wrong sign. And they say that all roads lead to Rome, but every roundabout had a sign pointing the way to Brescia, which was in the opposite direction from where we were going. And sometimes the sign would point to the west, and the next time it would point to the east.
We finally made it to Parma at 7 pm and stopped at the first hotel we saw, the Astoria Residence Hotel. They charged us 14 euros to park, but they gave us an hour of free internet. I'll have to post this on the blog tomorrow because I used up all my time booking our hotel for tomorrow night in San Gimignano in Tuscany. We wanted to be sure to prebook something with free parking and free internet.
There was a very nice restaurant next door to the hotel, so we enjoyed a nice bottle of wine and Lora had lamb chops and I had pork cheeks and pollenta. And we both had our first green salad of the trip. Surprisingly, neither of us had anything that needed to be topped with Parmesan cheese.
After our morning breakfast of bread, cheese, and water in our room, we checked out of our hotel and took the Alilaguna public water taxi back to the airport in Venice to pick up our rental car to begin our journey to Tuscany. We have two nights with no reservations and a map.
Our first stop was going to be Padova, but there was nothing there, so we continued on to Fair Varona. We parked in front of a pizza restaurant (free parking!) and had lunch. Great pizza! We were very close to the old walled city and the colluseum, so we walked around the city, until we came upon the statue of Juliette beneath her balcony. The city was bigger than we expected and we did not know that there was a colluseum there. It is used today as a theater. We enjoyed our walk around this charming city.
We found an internet cafe and tried to book a hotel for the night in our next destination, Parma, but the computers were slow, the Hotels.com site kept jumping back into Italian and couldn't tell what I was booking, and finally my 30 minutes of time ended just as I was entering my credit card info. So we just decided to wing it.
The drive to Parma was reminiscent of our walks around Venice -- we felt lost every minute of the way. The roundabouts every kilimeter had confusing signs that pointed every which way (I think the Italians like to mess with the tourists) and we had to back track several times when we realized that we had followed the wrong sign. And they say that all roads lead to Rome, but every roundabout had a sign pointing the way to Brescia, which was in the opposite direction from where we were going. And sometimes the sign would point to the west, and the next time it would point to the east.
We finally made it to Parma at 7 pm and stopped at the first hotel we saw, the Astoria Residence Hotel. They charged us 14 euros to park, but they gave us an hour of free internet. I'll have to post this on the blog tomorrow because I used up all my time booking our hotel for tomorrow night in San Gimignano in Tuscany. We wanted to be sure to prebook something with free parking and free internet.
There was a very nice restaurant next door to the hotel, so we enjoyed a nice bottle of wine and Lora had lamb chops and I had pork cheeks and pollenta. And we both had our first green salad of the trip. Surprisingly, neither of us had anything that needed to be topped with Parmesan cheese.
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