Why We Love To Travel or Trial By GPS Part II

The Eldership has landed!

Hello all you there back on Terra Firma wherever that may be. Nous sommes ici en France. Except we aren't in France at all. We are in Italia! It's a long story. But I digress.

I write to you here drinking my early morning espresso from the Captain's lounge.

I have cleverly disguised the Eldership to look just like a small villa on the Mediterranean coast.

C'est charmante n'est-ce pas?

I am going to use French because damn it the original ElderFleet coordinates said we were supposed to be in France!

But let's move on. Yesterday was a travel day. We had an 8 AM flight out of Helsinki through Stockholm to Nice France. Unfortunately our flight from Helsinki was delayed by two hours. This was no cause for alarm as we had a four hour layover in Stockholm scheduled. We were flying on SAS (the Air Asia of Europe as far as I'm concerned) because it is a Star Alliance member and I get some perks like using their club and early boarding. The flights were uneventful except the long flight to Nice being packed, we sitting in sardine class, and the only free beverage offered was tea or coffee. Not even water.

Arriving at Nice it took forever to get our rental car. There were only four people ahead of us in line with two serving them. Each one seemed to have these HUGE issues related to options that they had to discuss ad nauseum. So it was almost 30 minutes before we finally got there. It only took me minutes because I am Gold at Hertz and all my paperwork was done. BUT we had to then take a shuttle bus to another terminal because there was construction at ours and all the rental cars were at the other. THEN we had to walk all over the place because the signage as to where to find the rental cars was so poor.

At last we got our car. They upgraded us to a big ole thing which I wasn't too happy about given driving in narrow French/Italian streets but it was too late. I set up our GPS. I had loaded a new map before we left Finland. It didn't work. We tried multiple times. Finally we made use of Google Maps on my phone but the quality of the directions in terms of giving you enough notice of where to turn was inferior to our Tom Tom and we had to make many corrections (such as going the wrong direction on the Autoroute to begin with, wrong turns in town, etc.)

Did I happen to mention in the past that this type of challenge/adventuring is why Wife and I love to travel? I know it always is so much more fun in the retelling than in the actual doing.

We finally arrived in Latte Italy. Getting to the rental is a bit of a hairy ass adventure. It's up a steep crazy twisty narrow road! Who would believe? I mean just because virtually all of our rentals  are that way doesn't mean the all of our rentals should be that way. Of course we even got lost there ending up going in the exit of a grocery store rather than up the tiny street that looks like an alley.

But success was finally ours. Except we had to go down into the crazy Italian Supermarket to get basic food stuffs which was yet another adventure.

After collapsing with fatigue, I was up early this morning, managed to get the map correctly on the GPS, and got to see just how beautiful this place is.