Day 1 in Italy: Monday, October 20th

          My family and I arrived in Italy this morning at about 8:30AM after having been traveling for a little over 24 hours.  I am traveling with 8 other people, soon to be 9 when my sister joins us in a about a week in Paris, so right now there are a total of 9 people on this trip. Those 9 include my Mother, Father, my brother Lorin, Lorin’s best friend Shane, Shane’s mom, Tonya, and our good family friends, Richard and Charlene.  When we landed at the airport in Milan, Italy, after gathering all of our luggage, we made our way to the Avis Rental Car station with the hope that they had the 9 passenger van we had previously reserved.  Luckily they had it, so we loaded up all of our luggage and piled into the car to started our journey from Milan to the place we are staying. 

I love this view

The place we are staying is called Volpaia, which is right outside of Firenze (Florence) located about 4 hours from Milan. It was a long drive after traveling on a plane for 12+ hours.  We were about 2.5 hours into our journey when our lovely stick shift van started to act up and make some interesting noises.  When we pulled over on the side of the freeway my Dad tried to put the car in reverse, and of course nothing happened.  We rolled the windows down and smelt something burning so we all got out of the car immediately.  We believe that our transmission blew out, however, we still do not know for sure.  We ended up waiting about an hour for the tow truck to show up.  Now keep in mind that we are in the middle of Italy with my Grandfather who speaks Spanish, which is similar to Italian but also very different, as well as our friend Charlene who attempts to speak the 30+ words that she knows. Thus meaning that it is extremely difficult for any of us to communicate with anyone unless it is relating to food, since that is what we pretty much came here for.  As we explained to the tow truck driver what had happened he proceeded to hook up our car to his truck, along with all of us in the van.  This, my friends, was 100% illegal, but you gotta do what you gotta do, right?  Our only other options were to:

Our car adventure

1. Sit on the side of the freeway with all of our luggage and wait for 3 taxis to drive over an hour to get us and take us the rest of the way to Florence.
2. Have one person ride with the tow truck driver back to his shop, then take a taxi to the Florence airport (1.5 hours away) to pick up our new rental car, and then back to get us all.  
3. To all ride in the van in the back of the tow truck back to the tow truck place to get into a different van and be driven to the Florence airport to switch into a new van and carry on to the house we were booked to stay at.

So, naturally we went with option 3, which happened to be one of the scariest, most fun, and most memorable experiences of my entire life.  As most people may see this as being one of the worst things that could happen to them, I, in a weird way, enjoyed it.  It was quite the experience!

-Emma