Ist Day on Our Own

Well, we said the tearful goodbye to most of our group last night.  Most of them are leaving for the airport at 6am, and the rest, including us, are not leaving until 8:05am.  We are going to the airport with that group because we will pick up our rental car at the airport. Then we are on our own for two weeks.  The best thing about that may well be...sleeping in!  Wish us luck finding our way out of Rome.

Now we are in Umbertide for the night.  What a day!  Joe lost his wallet the other day, and it had in it: two credit cards (now cancelled), his debit card and drivers license.  But he has his International Drivers  License and a copy of his regular drivers license.  Well Avis in Rome wouldn't accept them as sufficient identification, even though he also showed them his passport.  A big caffuffle happened at the counter.  Long story short, I had to be the driver as I FORTUNATELY brought my drivers license with me.  However, Joe is doing the driving of course. the rental car is a VW Golf.

So off we go with our GPS.  We are heading north and decide it is time to stop and find a hotel room.  A place called Perugia was our destination.  We we got there.  It is of course on a hill as everything is in this country. We went up and down narrow cobblestoned roads, some of which do not look like a road at all.  Well, round and round we went and not only could we not find a hotel (they are not signed like ours in Canada) there would be no place to park if we did find one.  Well it took us a while to get out of that blasted place and we went back to the highway heading north.

We decided to try a little village called Umbertide. And lo and behold, we see a hotel sign and it has a restaurant attached.  We thought we had died and gone to heaven.  We were both hungry and food and drink sounded great.  This was around 5:30 pm.  We booked and then were told  "Sorry the restaurant is closed today".   We had to go into the town.  The first restaurant we checked didn't open for dinner until 7pm.  We did end up with a typical Italian dinner, pizza and gelato.
Bought 2 litres of wine and a bag of popcorn for the room.

Glad to be settling in for the night and sleeping in.

Off northward tomorrow