Saturday, September 25

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What a day today has been!! We began with a sleep-in day in Rome. We then got dressed, had a leisurely breakfast, packed our things, and checked out of the Hilton Cavalieri. What a beautiful hotel!! We got a taxi to the train station, arriving almost 2 hours before our train departed. The train station was lovely, but we did not really know what we were doing. Fortunately, we found some English speaking ladies with experience and finally the Information kiosk. We boarded our train for Florence at 1:20…our scheduled time was 1:15, so we thought this was really good!! The trip to Florence was seamless. This was good news because then the adventure began. First we had to find the Hertz rental car place. The person at the Info booth in the Florence terminal gave sketchy directions. We ended up back at the train depot for a taxi ride that, although only a few blocks, was 10 Euros. We got the car, plus added a GPS. No one was very friendly or helpful in Florence. Turns out that Dennis still knows how to drive a manual transmission. The GPS really helped us navigate getting out of the city and Dennis did a great job of getting us where we needed to go. We found our destination without a problem and the Hotel Pescille is everything that we expected!!! We have a beautiful city of San Gimignano view. After unpacking and settling in, we drove to San Gimignano to get a few necessities and see what the town is like. It is everything anyone would imagine a small Italian town in Tuscany to be…quaint, charming, full of locals. We got a tad turned around as we tried to return to our hotel. Finally we figured it all out and found our place. We had a delicious dinner tonight at the hotel. We were starved, as we had not had anything to eat since our breakfast at the hotel this morning. We are comfortably ready for bed and looking forward to a full week of quiet relaxation. Tomorrow we have decided that we are going to do nothing but relax in the Tuscan sun!!

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