Bound for Siena

Monday, March 21, 2011 (Part 1)

We left Rome today, and I think we were ready to leave. We had faced such frustration at the Vatican Museum and the Colosseum that we were ready for a "fresh start."

We were up early - at 6:30 a.m. - and we checked out of the Hotel Fontanella Borghese by 7:45 a.m. We had ordered a cab to take us to a Hertz office on the outskirts of town and, once having picked up our rental car (which was very comfor

table), we faced our biggest challenge of the day.

Driving in Italy (and in most of Europe) can be frustrating -- for Americans. This is so for at least two reasons. First, there are very few street signs. Second, the highway route numbers and the directions of the highways (north, south, east, west) are not well marked. Rather, directions are most often provided by signs indicating the towns that lie ahead. But if you do not know the towns in the area, this is fairly useless information! [Note: We do this in the US too, but we are obviously much more familiar with the geography there. As a foreigner in a foreign land, it is, sadly, not very helpful.]

We had one advantage, though. Dad has a European GPS system. Initially, we had some difficulty picking up a satellite signal. But once we found the connection, it worked pretty well. Our next problem was that we had trouble trusting the GPS. It would tell us to get on a particular road going east, when we felt

(strongly) that we really should be going west. Or we would enter a rotary and the GPS would tell us to get off at the third exit, but the second exit had a sign pointing to Siena so Dad got off there instead. When we allowed our instincts to interfere, the GPS would then need to "recalculate." It did a lot of "recalculating," because we made quite a few wrong turns, and we started to go a little crazy.

The other problem was that the GPS would often give an instruction to turn right or left when we were right on top of the turn -- and Dad would go past the intended road. This happened several times, and it really wasn't Dad's fault. But we persevered and after some misdirection, we finally got on the main highway headed in the right direction to Siena.

The pictures here were taken on our first afternoon in Siena when, among other things, we spent some time in Il Campo - the mail town square. Oh, and Dad bought a new scarf here (which you see in the pictures) because this was our coldest day in Italy. It was also very windy. He made a smart purchase and made good use of it.