Traumatic.... moral buidling... irrating... test in patience.... Mom's, Josh's, Alicia's and my respective views of our airport experience! From the descriptions you can tell that there were several frights, challenges, problems, and lines....respectively.

The first problem... Alicia's guitar never showed up on the baggage belt. Thus began the downward spiral. VERY long wait with baggage assistance department... guitar still in DC. Thirsty... so mom leaves to go exchange dollars for euros and never returns!! Apparently she exited one part of the airport and was forbidden to to back to her family. Security would not even page us or look for us. Of course we could not call each other because we opted not to use international calling due to cost. After several hours the airport promised to deliver Alicia's guitar when it made it to Italy and mom somehow made it to the baggage department window and hollered at us so we could meet up.

We needed sustinance!! We then enjoyed some of the best airport cheese pizza ever!

Next... finding the rental car! We had to take a shuttle bus. One thing I learned very early about Italians... they butt in line and never say scuzi! RUDE! After more than 24 hours without sleep I was NOT in the best of mood for people to be rude! Mom kept sushing me... shush... "Don't get the Italians mad at us or we will get NO help!"

Finally getting the car we asked for a good road map of Tuscany. NO ONE had one! They said... "Follow the blue signs to Frienze on the fast road... get off on the Ponsacco exit and follow signs to Voltera." P.S. the speed limit's 90 km.... What is that!? With the aid of Google we find that 90 km equals 55.9234 miles per hour! NOBODY drove 56 mph! It was a very harrowing experience! It turned out that it was a good thing Josh got the most sleep on the plane!

On the small road to Volterra... where people pass where ever and when ever - regardless of safety issues or laws... we discovered that Josh has natural European driving skills (or should I say balls). I think I'll leave all the driving up to him from now on!

When we reached Volterra there was a horrible accident where a biker and a car trying to avoid each other crashed in a horrible way. It was a great eye-opener to still be careful even when everyone else is driving rather recklessly.

Our only directions to the villa where we were staying... take SR68 and look for kilo marker 49 and take the gravel road. We made it! - Whew!